


atlas

by chrysalizzm



Series: young god [4]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Angst, Deity Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF), Drabble Collection, Families of Choice, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Platonic Relationships, Queerplatonic Relationships, Tags May Change, They/Them Pronouns for Eret (Video Blogging RPF), Trans Floris | Fundy, Unconventional Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28423635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalizzm/pseuds/chrysalizzm
Summary: The world bends for Dream and Dream bends for his friends and his friends bend for Dream, not necessarily in that order.Or: A drabbles series foryoung god.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Series: young god [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999633
Comments: 556
Kudos: 862





	1. cut and dried

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: during niki’s chapter | canon | characters: dream, george, sapnap, punz, niki (mentioned), eret (mentioned) | mild angst | warnings: mild injury | word count: 2.4k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello hello! if you’re a new reader, this isn’t the beginning of this au! you’re human tonight is the “main” fic and should be read before reading this. to returning readers: hi! i missed everyone lots ^^ things are a bit hectic for me for the next month or so, but after that i should be relatively free to write more often.

They’re sitting around the fireplace, Sapnap and Punz and George, waiting for Dream to come back with the extra swords and shields. Punz isn’t nervous, not particularly; they have Eret, if things go south, and Dream’s an excellent shot. Punz has few doubts the Dream SMP will see this whole thing through. 

Still, there’s a simmer of doubt on the back burner in his mind, one that he’s trying to avoid bringing to boil by occupying himself with sharpening his axe on the communal whetstone, beating back his nerves with a satisfying, hair-raising _shink_ every ten seconds. Weapons maintenance is something Punz just likes in general, something he does to take his mind off things every once in a while. Therapeutic in a mind-numbing way. Soothing in its monotony and obvious usefulness. 

Sapnap and George are both busying themselves, too; Sapnap’s worrying his flint and steel together in his hands, which Punz is keeping a wary eye on, and George is re-stringing his bow with overwhelming care. There’s probably something to be said for how all of their selected pastimes are somehow related to destruction, but Punz is the server’s self-designated merc and someone who knows how to pick and choose sides; he’s learned to avoid reading too far between the lines. 

George looks up once he’s tested the give of the bowstring, his eyes narrowing behind his clout goggles as he looks at the clock on the wall. “Hasn’t it been, like, fifteen minutes since Dream left?” he says, less of a question and more of an observation. “The warehouse isn’t that far from here.”

Sapnap’s flint and steel catch against each other with a loud shatter of sparks, and when both Punz and George shoot him alarmed looks, Sapnap snorts and returns to not setting Punz’s very woodsy house on fire with a deceptively light, “He might just be taking his time, y’know. Taking in the scenery.” He pauses, then lowers his voice, eyes flitting to George and Punz, more serious: “I don’t think... well, he doesn’t like... you know. Doing this. Death.”

George presses his lips together, tweaks the arrow rest. “He doesn’t do it without reason,” he says, firm. “He never has. This whole thing with L’Manberg - Dream thinks he has to do it.” George sighs. “He always thinks,” he mutters, “that he has an obligation to us all.”

“He doesn’t,” blurts Punz, then bites his tongue when Sapnap and George glance over at him. He hadn’t intended to jump into the conversation - Sapnap and George are Dream’s best friends, have known him since childhood where Punz and Dream have only been friends for a few years, and Punz usually stays out of the discussion whenever the topic moves into personal territory out of respect - but the insinuation that Dream believes he owes something to them had made his hackles rise. 

Finally George smiles, slight, and it softens his countenance. “You’re right, he doesn’t,” he says gently, “and sometimes I think he knows that, and then - ” the corners of his lips turn down, “ - and then he does something like this.”

Sapnap shrugs, scrapes the flint and steel together. Says, grimacing, “Well, he made his bed, now he’s sleeping in it. It’s not like he’s faultless. L’Manberg’s not faultless either.” He glances at the door, then says, fast, hushed, “It’s a stupid war.”

Punz has to agree with that; he nods conspiringly with George, though, to keep up appearances. Punz honestly doesn’t believe there’s anyone who thinks the “war” (which he can’t bring himself to refer to without quotes; they’re all kids, and they were all having fun, and they were getting too into it) is worth it. Punz had thought Dream had been taking it lightly, too, for how distant he can seem, but all along, he was right there beside Tommy, the two egging each other on, feeding off of each other’s energy and reflecting it in a constant loop. Normally, it wouldn’t have been a problem - Punz shudders to imagine the two in the same team for a Championship, how potent the combination could be - but in this case, it was... devastating. With every battle they fought they got more invested in the end result; with every drop of blood spilled they became determined to spill more. Desperate to protect their friends, ready to sacrifice any and everything for them: Dream and Tommy are shockingly alike. 

George is outright glaring at the clock now, lips a thin line. An intense internal debate is happening all over his face, but he remains frozen with his fingers laced around the bow until Sapnap rolls his eyes and says, “Dude, quit being gloomy and just go check on him if you’re that worried.” He perks up and adds, “Maybe he’s organizing things. You know how he gets when we don’t put shit back where it was before.” 

“That’s your own fault. Stop putting the Sharpnesses with the Fire Aspects, that’s a dick move,” George tells him matter-of-factly, and stands up as Sapnap squawks, setting the bow against the wall beside four more bows. He rolls his shoulders, adjusts his helmet, keeps his hand on the hilt of his sword as he strides across the room and pulls the door open. 

Punz flies into a standing position, his axe clattering to the floor; Sapnap nearly drops his flint and steel when he sees what’s going on. George claps his sword hand over his mouth. 

“...Hi,” says Dream from the doorway, sounding small, perhaps because of the fucking _cut on his throat_ that is bleeding all over his clothes and chestplate. 

“Holy _fuck,”_ says Sapnap, and he probably would have made it to Dream’s side before Punz if he hadn’t gotten his feet twisted in the carpet and caught himself from falling with a yelp. Punz mostly ignores him in favor of running over to the door and helping George help Dream over the threshold into the house with extreme care; there’s really no telling what happened just some looking at the wound, and Dream is breathing all fast and wheezy in his chest, so Punz is inclined to err toward caution rather than worsen Dream’s condition. 

As soon as they get Dream into a chair George is all business, barking at Sapnap to grab a healing potion, asking Punz a bit more nicely for a flask of water, and is scrutinizing Dream’s wound as discreetly as he can when Dream rasps, “No potion.”

“What do you _mean_ , no potion? Dream, we have a lot of healings, we can spare one, that’s all it’ll take - oh god, wait, is it worse than it looks?” George twists Dream’s upper body so they’re properly in the firelight, moves Dream’s head around gingerly but deliberately to get a good look at the injury as Dream clenches his jaw and Punz wrings his hands beside them, feeling a little useless. He knows basic first aid, as all fighters should, but there’s not exactly a manual for how to react when your friend comes home from a twenty-minute excursion that should have taken ten sporting a distinctly alarming wound to the _neck_ that’s gushing blood all over himself and your floors. 

“Your talking sounds fine, so there’s no way it got past muscle, and you’d be dead if that were the case,” decides George, drops his hands and sets them on Dream’s shoulders, leans back onto his heels to scrutinize his best friend. Punz scoots around them so he can see Dream’s face and is startled by the careful blankness of his expression, as though he were deliberately avoiding giving away what he’s feeling, which. Dream isn’t exactly the best at hiding how he feels behind stoicism. He’s much more adept at putting on a smiling front, beaming mouth and blizzard of freckles a better disguise than an attempt at a serious character. 

Punz feels his doubt mutate into a quiet kind of anger. “Dream,” he says slowly, “who did this?”

George shoots him a warning look, which Punz does his best to ignore. It’s no secret amongst those who’ve known Dream for longer that there’s an unspoken agreement not to pry, but sue Punz, his friend just staggered in from a simple errand looking like he met his fucking maker, and no matter what people say about shallow injuries, neck wounds bleed like no tomorrow. Punz can see from this angle - an inch or two further and Dream would’ve come back to Punz’s house via respawn instead of walking, and that knowledge is what keeps him from taking his words back.

Dream brings a hand to his throat to stem the flow of blood as best he can and says, wincing, “It doesn’t... matter. ‘S not a problem.”

“It’s not a - _Dream,”_ says George imploringly. “Don’t pull the self-sacrificial tendencies out now, I’m begging you. It’s a big deal to us, okay?”

Punz blinks at how forward George is about the whole thing, considering he literally just nonverbally reprimanded Punz for hitting too close to home - but then again, he amends to himself, best friends that grew up together and all. There’s a line there he can’t breach, not like this. They may be close friends but digging up deep-rooted self-destructive tendencies probably isn’t part of the fine print. 

Dream tilts his head then winces again when it aggravates the injury. He gingerly adjusts his hand, hesitates, then mumbles, “Don’t be angry with her. She was scared.”

Punz feels his breath hiss between his teeth. Now that Alyssa’s gone, there are only two people on Dream’s world who use she/her pronouns, and Eret has been upstairs humming softly the entire time, so - “Niki?” he says, not believing Dream for a split second, thinking of the kind smile and soft cheer and mild timidness. _“Niki_ cut your throat?”

“Niki Nihachu did _what?”_ demands Sapnap’s voice, and Punz looks up in time to see Sapnap striding over, a vividly magenta potion bottle in one hand and loops of cloth bandages in the other. His eyes are round as ender pearls, disbelieving, as he kneels beside Dream and mops some of the blood off his chestplate with the bandages. “What the hell - how’d she cross the - well, we don’t have border patrol or anything, but - holy shit, _Niki_ did this?”

Dream does the exaggerated head roll that indicates his eyes rolled too. “You underestimate her.”

“I didn’t think she was the type to do this kind of thing,” admits George, leaning back onto his haunches and pulling the healing pot from Sapnap’s fingers when Sapnap tries to administer it. 

Punz didn’t think so, either. During the few weeks she’s been present, Niki established herself as the soft one; she’d bake often and let people stop by for a bite, grew copious amounts of flowers on the walkway outside her house, doted on her few pets as though the world would end if they were ill-cared for. She in no way struck Punz as the kind of hellions Sapnap or Tommy or Dream are, nor did she seem the person who would willingly and unflinchingly commit murder in the name of what amounts to a game the other half of the server is playing.

He says as much, and Sapnap shrugs one shoulder in agreement. George, busy with smearing a styptic over the wound, doesn’t acknowledge the statement. Dream, however, purses his lips and makes a sound of disagreement.

“The thing is, they... don’t think it’s a game. They’re taking this dead serious.” Dream pauses as George pokes the open cut on accident, hums noncommittally when George murmurs a quick apology and takes the bandages from Sapnap. “For their sake... so am I. To be honest... I kinda expected something like this. Just caught off-guard.” His sentences are disjointed, broken up where he inhales sharply in response to the sting, but Punz can piece the picture together now, and he bites his thumbnail when he realizes why, exactly, Dream’s made the decision to kill Tommy.

Because that’s what’s going to happen tomorrow morning without a single doubt and they all know it, the Dream SMP and L’Manberg both. Tommy’s good but he can’t hold a candle to Dream, and at this point in the fake (real?) war it’s become abundantly clear that Dream isn’t going to do an about-face. Tommy’s going to die tomorrow, and Dream’s hand will be the one releasing the arrow.

Punz is hyper-aware of all the mines in the conversation. Ever-so-delicately, he asks, “Is that why... is that why Niki tried to...?” He mimes a slashing motion across his throat.

It makes Dream laugh quietly, which Punz counts as a point for himself. Once George kicks him and tells him to settle down unless he wants to be throttled by the bandages that are supposed to staunch the blood flow, he says, “No... well, not really. I think it was about... trying to see if I had... any mercy. Checking if I was still... me? Like... proof that I’m... not the bad guy.”

“You’re not,” Punz says immediately, ignoring the way his heart buckles a little when Dream looks startled. “You’re not the bad guy in this story. You’re just as much caught up in this as we are. We all got too invested.”

“Hear, hear,” Sapnap says supportively from the floor, cutting strips of bandages for George.

Dream does the same half-shrug Sapnap did and says lowly, “Like I said. It doesn’t matter. I’m the world - the world owner... I have a responsibility to everyone.” His eyes burn green beneath the mask, and Punz swallows the placating denials he’d been about to offer. It hits him like a sack of bricks, standing there helpless as George winds bandages around Dream’s neck and Sapnap passes the roll of them back and forth between his hands: in this, Dream will not be swayed. It’s nothing like delusion, but Dream sees through the heart of the matter so piercingly that he forgets that there’s pain involved in the middle step between action and consequence; he forgets that this will hurt.

Punz can’t help how desperate he sounds when he reaches out to clench one of Dream’s still-bloody hands (and fuck, if that doesn’t take him back to a month prior, his sword jammed up to the hilt in Dream’s chest, the slick of Dream’s blood on his hands and shirt and pants and the grass of the clearing until everything glistened red) and asks, “Are you sure, Dream?” because there’s no taking this back.

Dream tilts his chin high and his voice is as unyielding as obsidian when he says, “I am,” and Punz has no idea why it sounds as much like divine ordination as it does, but it chills him to the bone to see his friend, pale, bloody, burning eyes and straight back, committing his words to the air as irrevocably as though he were carving it into stone: “I’m sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i’ll probably write quite a few of these types of “missing scene” chapters! i like them, i think they’re fun little glimpses into the happenings of you’re human tonight that add depth. also i just. crave angst softened by fluff. so there’s that
> 
> ahhh the words will just not Go folks. it’s a lil rough, i have my outlines all done up for the interlude fic and the sequel, but the words are all stuck so i keep flagging even though i know i want to give this to you guys. :/// the words do be very rude at the moment. we’ll see if the interlude turns out or if i have to scrap it entirely. at any rate, here is the beginning of the long-awaited???? or at least very hyped-up drabbles for young god ^^


	2. strawberry skies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: post-yht, pre-sequel | canon | characters: eret, dream, mcc 12 contestants mentioned | fluff, humor | word count: 2.5k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have some aggressively beautiful eret + the glorious, orderly chaos that is mcc afterparty!! + a pinch of plot. just a smidgeon

Eret walks into the official MCC 12 afterparty twenty minutes late and holding a thermos with four tea bag tags dangling out of it. 

There’s something gratifying about the way nobody bats an eye at how overdressed they are for what’s typically a pretty casual event. The afterparties have always felt more like sleepovers than formal gatherings, and there’s been more than one occasion where players have spent the night in the venue after crashing from the adrenaline high or just for the sake of staying. The afterparties are where decorum and primping go to die. Eret can’t count the number of times they’ve woken up wedged between several tangentially familiar people, sighed in acceptance, and fallen asleep again. 

Still, fuck gender roles, and they really just didn’t know where they were going to wear the beautiful strawberry dress outside of special occasions, so here they are, crashing a Championship they didn’t actually compete in for the sake of wearing an outfit that’s just too extra to wear in day-to-day life. Regardless of what HBomb said, it’s definitely a valid reason. 

“Eret!! The heck’re you doing here, you weren’t even in the event!”

Speaking of HBomb. 

Eret can feel the grin overtaking their face even before a pajama-clad HBomb dives off of the nearby table (good to see the table-claiming has already begun), performs a decent shoulder roll both to soften the impact and to look cool, and launches himself into Eret’s arms. Eret yelps and raises the thermos out of splash radius so they don’t accidentally make a Zuko out of their friend. 

“You look so extra!” HBomb tells them cheerfully once the hug is over, stepping back to survey the full outfit. It’s nothing particularly earth-shattering - just the shimmering strawberry dress and the five-inch black leather heels and the jewelled crown just for the vibes - well, okay, so maybe it is a little earth-shattering, Eret knows full well they look great, and their ego is further boosted by HBomb pursing his lips into a whistle and saying earnestly, “But actually, dude, you look amazing. The dress is so neat.” He squints down at Eret’s feet, then groans, “God, that’s why the hug felt weird. You’re, like, ten inches taller right now.”

“Five,” they tell HBomb proudly. HBomb puts his head in his hands. 

“You’re a foot taller than me, Eret,” he whispers despairingly. “What the fuck. What the _fuck._ This should be illegal. You’re taller than Sam right now, for fuck’s sake.”

 _“Wow,”_ comes an admiring drawl, and Eret finds themself smirking down at Sapnap, looking like the pinnacle of both comfort and fashion in a puffy panda onesie, who’s trying very hard not to seem short in comparison to them and is failing miserably. “Eret, you’re objectively the best dressed here. How are you walking in those? I’d probably snap both my ankles.”

Eret feints like they’re going to kick Sapnap and laughs when he dances out of range. “Go celebrate with the winners. Go on, get,” they tell him fondly. 

“Don’t wanna,” he replies petulantly, mock-pouting at them. “I literally can’t congratulate them anymore, my jaw’s gonna fall off. Anyway, I’m gonna eat my body weight in pretzels. Wanna come with?”

“If Bad were here,” announces HBomb mournfully, still hung up on the full twelve inches of height difference, “he’d stop you from making inadvisable decisions.”

“Well, parental unit’s not here,” Sapnap gloats back, mostly joking. “He can’t tell me not to make bad choices.”

“I don’t think he could stop you even if he _were_ here,” Eret says thoughtfully. 

“Amen to that.”

“Eret, come _on,_ it’s afterparty! Fun times, horrible decisions, waking up as victims of our own hubris tomorrow,” Sapnap says coaxingly. “Pretty please? Your outfit fuckin’ slaps, you can’t just sit in a corner and gossip with old boy forever.”

Eret chokes at the look of utter devastation on HBomb’s face. “When we get back home, I’m calling Punz on your ass,” he whispers brokenly. 

“Not if I call him first, boomer,” says Sapnap without a moment of hesitation. Eret drags him off to the snacks table before HBomb suffers any more trauma at the hands of the SMP’s beloved pyromaniac. 

Of course, it’s afterparty, so it’s bound to be fun. It’s one of Eret’s favorite public events, a laid-back get-together after the adrenaline trip that is Championship (which Eret’s been pushing as the new tagline, because they think the rhyme is cute and also really funny) that feels more like a forty-ish-person sleepover than anything else. Everyone always attends, though plenty crash as soon as they walk in and don’t wake up for around twenty hours. Afterparty’s attendees are limited to previous Championship participants and Noxcrew; altogether, it makes for a relaxed time after performing several death-defying feats in a publicized three-hour hell game. 

Eret is drowned under a wave of compliments when they walk further into the room with Sapnap leading them through, him clearly focused on the row of snack tables and them smiling and feeling like their heart is going to explode as people alternately scream over their dress and scream about their height. No one else in Championship is especially tall with few exceptions, adding to the illusion that they’re a spruce in a forest of oaks. 

By the time they finally reach the refreshments, someone’s turned on the music - it cycles through three different deep house remixes of “That’s What I Like” amidst the howls of an enraged TommyInnit before settling on girl in red to general approval - and people have begun to spread out. Eret spots Pete passed out at the corner of the dance floor with his head on Burren’s stomach, and Fruit, Illumina, and Punz in a heap beside the drinks table. 

They lean against a table casually, survey the crowd. They hadn’t seen the last few rounds of Dodgebolt because they were trying to find a way to put the strawberry dress on that didn’t involve shedding unfortunate amounts of glitter everywhere, so they scan the sea of heads for the tell-tale glint of winner’s crowns - it was between Lime and Green, if they recall correctly - and a smile breaks out on their face when they spot the four forest-green figures at the end of the row of tables. 

Green won, by the looks of it. Phil’s radiant, his bucket hat skewed and his wings all aflutter with excitement; he keeps tapping Wilbur with them and grinning giddily when their eyes meet, which just makes Eret’s heart fucking melt, the father and son gleeful on the thrill of victory. George, for his part, is speaking animatedly to Scott, Dan, and Shelby, all four of them making some sort of hand motion that suggests they’re talking about Hole in the Wall. TapL is...

Eret pushes off the table, frowning, when they see TapL. 

It’s nothing too bad. He’s not outright panicking or anything like that. Still, the sharpness of his smile is dulled somewhat, and he keeps passing his hand over his face, a nervous motion. Eret can tell his teammates have noticed, judging by the way they’re very clearly not leaving him alone, how they keep bringing him into conversations, how Wilbur, the designated clingy one of the team, has his arm looped through TapL’s, but Eret can tell even from this distance he’s more concentrated on breathing than on the talk. 

Eret is winding their way carefully through the throng of people when they feel something - a call, a laugh, a breath - so strikingly familiar and out-of-place their head snaps up toward the Green Guardians. 

Dream’s gliding through the crowd like a fish through water, easy to pick out thanks to the flashy fake crown and scarlet fur-trimmed cloak and golden hair that tapers down into pink thanks to the hair extensions he got for his quote-unquote “Technobraid” (“I’m going all in or not at all. I’d probably be a good cosplayer”). He’s making a beeline for Green, his gait discernibly purposeful, and for a moment Eret thinks he’s just going to talk to George or something. 

They inhale sharply when he waves cheerily at TapL. 

They don’t know what tips them off. It might be how much of themself they see in TapL all of a sudden, jittery, unsure, trying to get a grip on himself, just like that night in the northernmost turret; it might be the steel-solid resolve in the line of Dream’s shoulders under the velvet cape as he strides toward TapL. Phil, George, and Wilbur are all visibly distracted.

_quiet qui -_

Eret snatches Dream’s arm away and chirps, “Hi, TapL! Congratulations on your win!”, pointedly ignoring both their swelling relief and the startled look Dream shoots them.

TapL lights up when he sees them. “Eret! Nice to see you!” He gestures toward all six-foot-eight and shimmering strawberry skirt of them with arms that shake only slightly and says, “You look awesome!” His smile turns a little shy. “And thanks.”

“Dude, you were legendary in To Get To The Other Side,” Dream interjects, and Eret’s fingers loosen on his wrist, gratified by the earnestness of his voice. “I saw the block clutch from the back, it was cool as hell.” Something in his tone is stilted, but it’s not that obvious, and TapL smiles wider down at his shoes. 

“Thanks,” he repeats, bashful. Wilbur, who’s pulled himself away from a five-way conversation between Tommy, Tubbo, Quackity, HBomb, and Quig, grins and nudges TapL gently with his elbow.

“You feeling better?” he asks, low, kind, the voice of a seasoned older brother. “You were a little shaky up there earlier.”

Wilbur doesn’t catch Dream stiffen, his attention fully on TapL; Eret does, though, and they lean over to step firmly on the hem of Dream’s cloak, effectively keeping him pinned in place, just in case he’s planning on doing anything stupid.

TapL rolls his shoulders, quirks his lips. “Yeah,” he confirms, taking a deep breath and letting it out in a gusty sigh. “Just post-Championship nerves, you know? First time I’ve ever won. It got to me all of a sudden, I guess. I feel way better now, though! It’s the good kind of jitters.” He shakes out his arms to demonstrate, and Eret has to laugh with him, as carefree and lighthearted as he is about it. It dispels the lingering fear at the back of their mind that hisses _He might feel the same way you did on election night, he might need help that can’t be given by you._

Dream flashes that incandescent grin of his and reaches out to squeeze George’s hand to congratulate him, stumbles because Eret’s forgotten to move their foot. They laugh in his face when he turns to give them a look full of more betrayal than they thought someone whose face is almost fully obscured could muster, and he wails to a truly unimpressed George about it, and Phil pokes at him with his wings and teases him. TapL is settling back down, cackling at some quip Wilbur throws out, and then Niki cuts in to get Eret to dance to “two queens in a king sized bed” because she loves them and also the dress (“Mostly the dress, to be honest, Eret”), and TapL gets dragged into dancing by Gizzy, and Phil sweeps away with Tubbo. Between getting passed from Niki to FWhip to Fundy to Puffy, they catch glimpses of Dream twirling under the laughing Captain’s arm, Sapnap monopolizing the pretzel bowl and fending off attackers, Tubbo and Tommy screaming with laughter as they spin one another around like a Beyblade from hell. At some point, as is tradition, everyone clears the dance floor and watches on as Landlord and Dream, staring deadpan into one another's eyes, do a waltz you could perform on a pie plate in dead silence. Noxite wheels in the cake not long after, and Scott smashes HBomb’s face into his slice. Fruit wakes up periodically to adjust his feet so that passersby will trip over his legs. It’s glorious and delirious and Eret wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

Things start winding down around two in the morning. Some participants leave for their home worlds; a lot stay behind, pulling out pajamas (if they weren’t already wearing them) and sleeping bags (if they had the foresight). Wilbur gallantly offers Eret his own pajamas because he’s the only person present whose clothes would fit them, much to Eret’s chagrin, but by the time they gather their wits enough to try to protest, he’s already climbed headfirst into his own sleeping bag still wearing his jumper and joggers from Championship, so they let it go, fold the dress as carefully as they possibly can, and drag their sleeping bag over to the bright green one because they want to ask the owner of it something.

Dream’s gold-and-pink head is just barely visible under the quilt, but when Eret sinks down beside him, he stirs. “Whozzat?” he mumbles, reaching out with a _familiar friendly friendly kind patient dedicated familiar_ “Eret?”

Eret snuggles in closer to avoid prying listeners and whispers, “How are you doing that?”

“Mm?”

“Your - the settling. You’re a minor god, but you didn’t create this world - Noxite, Stuart, and Landlord did that. How are you using your powers?”

“Hmm.” Dream turns so he’s facing Eret, and the mask, stark white, glows dimly in the dark as he whispers back, words drooping at the ends drowsily, “You’re right, ‘s weird... I didn’t think about it too hard. I can’t use any world-editing powers, that’s normal... Maybe it’s because, y’know... settling’s not a minor god power.” His eyes may be mostly concealed by his mask, but Eret can just barely make out Dream blinking blearily as he says, “I told you about them, right... the elder? They gave me this. Might be why I can use it all the time?”

“Oh,” Eret says back, throat tight. “Maybe.”

“Why?” Dream asks through a stifled yawn.

Eret bites their lip, thinking of TapL, thinking of themself a month prior, thinking of Dream with his boiling-hot fever that none of them were sure he’d wake up from. “What you were trying to do with TapL?” they opt to say softly. “Promise not to do it again?”

Dream shifts. “It’s my power, Eret,” he murmurs chidingly. “It helps.”

“I know it does. Believe me, I know.” _A panic attack washed to sea, a dam built atop regrets._ “But TapL is fine now, see? And he was okay, it just didn’t look like it from the outside. I can’t stop you from settling people,” they acquiesce, “and like you said, it’s your power, and you’re an adult - you know how to use it wisely. Just - promise me - promise _us_ \- you won’t jump to conclusions next time, settle someone who doesn’t need settling, and just make yourself feel worse? Promise, Dream?”

Dream hums sleepily, “Mm-hmm,” and sighs, and is asleep with his next inhale.

Eret calms their racing heart, finds Dream’s arm in the dark, twines their arms around his, and falls asleep themself, assured of his safety.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy new year, everyone! i wish all y’all and the ccs who have consumed our lives whole a very happy and healthy new year ^^ i’ve rung in the new year by strategically playing “your new boyfriend” so that i got the “woo!” at exactly midnight and i am still riding out the serotonin high from that


	3. trust fall? trust fall.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: post-yht, pre-sequel | canon | characters: dream, tommy, phil, wilbur, george | mild angst, fluff | word count: 2.2k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing tommy is so fun his profanity and insults are very creative and i strive to replicate his general gremlin energy
> 
> in response to a request from tumblr by Teahound: “I'm going to humbly suggest number 82 for atlas” as well as scwirrel who pointed out what a double-edged sword dream’s settling is. wanted to explore the ill-advised ways dream probably outright settles people now where he couldn’t before, and people making him see sense about using his powers to take everyone’s pain because pain and anxiety and hurt can be good!! as we saw in the strawberry skies chapter. but dream’s spent too much time getting into this mentality of “i have this unique ability to take away the hurts of other people so i should use it as much as i can” when in reality it can be very manipulative (as one can observe slightly in niki’s chapter in yht). dream coming to terms with having to let people heal on their own instead of trying to expedite, i guess! learning to be human in more than just his wanderlust and his uncomplicated love for his friends type of beat
> 
> 82\. “i trust you.”
> 
> (i'm taking writing prompts over on tumblr!)

“You,” Tommy tells Dream very patiently, “are _such_ an idiotic wanker.”

“You’re not making your case any better,” says Dream, like the idiotic wanker he is. 

Phil pinches the bridge of his nose. 

It’s all so fucking _stupid_. Dream and Tommy were talking about something - L’Manberg, probably, its future and the walls they tore down, whether or not to keep them that way - and Tommy hadn’t been looking were he was placing his feet, which is just so stupid, he’s literally an agility-based fighter, and Tommy could slap himself, but, well. They were walking around a ravine and Tommy had slipped because he’d stepped on an unsteady slide of dirt and gravel. He’s honestly lucky to have landed in the thick exposed cobwebs of a mineshaft, but it’s the misstep that landed him with a goddamn sprained ankle that had stung like a bitch for all of thirty seconds until Dream had scrambled down the face of the ravine wall, disentangled Tommy with a neat swipe of his sword, and looked Tommy dead in the eye as he took the pain away. 

“I’ve had plenty of sprained ankles, it’ll go away by itself,” Dream is saying, like an arse. George, sitting crammed up beside him in the armchair, looks like he agrees with Tommy’s assessment, judging by the scowl he shoots at his best friend even as he twines the swirls of Dream’s hair into a braid. 

“That’s not the point, Dream,” he snaps, with a tug on Dream’s hair to get his attention. “The point is that you shouldn’t be doing that at all. Tommy’s also had his fair share of sprained ankles - ” he hasn’t, actually, most of them are fully broken legs, “ - and even if he hasn’t, it shouldn’t matter.”

Wilbur, sitting with his head pillowed on his arms beside Tommy’s propped-up leg, pipes up, “Well, Tommy doesn’t want to bother with regens for something as small as this, but Phil’s paranoid about administering potions when Tommy can’t actually feel the effect of it, and at any rate it’s a good reminder for the child to actually look where he’s fucking going, so - _ow!”_ Wilbur reels back, shielding his face with one hand and cupping his nose with the other, where Tommy had kicked him with his bad foot. 

Phil, of course, immediately climbs up his arse about it. “Tommy!” he cries. “I already told you not to move it - I don’t give a shit that you can’t feel it, it’s still sprained!”

“This is why Techno doesn’t fucking love you,” says Wilbur thickly through his fingers. 

“Loves me more than you,” Tommy snips back, then, just as a fuck-you to Phil, rolls his ankle.

“Tommy!”

Dream scowls and says, “Don’t do that,” pointing at Tommy with his toe. “Just ‘cause you can’t feel it doesn’t mean you should.”

George makes a sound of outrage as he tugs one of Dream’s colorful hair ties from his wrist. “You are the biggest hypocrite I’ve ever met,” he says through gritted teeth, his tone completely offset by how carefully he ties Dream’s braid.

Phil finally stops metaphorically banging his head against the wall and comes round to sit beside Tommy, unfurls one wing to wrap around him and uses the other to pat the seat beside him when Wilbur slinks over sullenly. He watches Dream and George bicker for a moment before saying, “Hey, Dream,” in that very specific Dad Voice that makes both Tommy and Wilbur exchange looks. 

Dream cuts off his teasing “That’s not what you said when I - ” and cocks his head at Phil. 

Phil leans forward, bracing his elbows on his legs, and says firmly, “I need you to listen to what I have to say from the start to the end without interrupting me, okay?”

“Okay?” Dream replies uncertainly, clearly off-put by the shift in atmosphere.

Phil regards Dream for another moment in the dead quiet - Tommy’s holding his breath, trying desperately not to interrupt by breathing too loud or some shit, because Phil’s pulled out the Dad Voice and Tommy’ll be damned if he fucks up his groove, and one glance at Will tells him his older brother’s doing the same - and then he says, easy, “Minor god to minor god.”

George sucks in a sharp breath, shoots a glance at Dream. Dream, for his part, hesitates, then shifts - shifts in some way, maybe rolls his shoulders or something, something that makes him seem closer to Phil in carriage - and there’s something quiet and serious in his voice when he leans in with a small wince and echoes, “Minor god to minor god.”

“Okay.” Phil reaches out with a wing to pat Dream’s head. “Stop being such a fucking trainwreck.”

Dream squawks. Tommy chokes on his own spit.

“Phil!” says Wilbur, somehow managing to sound scandalized whilst clamping both hands over his mouth to stifle his laughter. “Be nice! You’re the worst therapist I’ve ever met!”

Phil rolls his eyes fondly and plows on, “I’m serious. You wanna help people - your friends - you made this world for them. I get that. I do.” His face clouds briefly, and with a start Tommy thinks of earlier years - a blistering cold and a quiver of arrows and the flat look in Phil’s eyes as he wound a diamond between his fingers. SMPEarth was Will’s brainchild and Phil’s masterpiece, a thing of profound beauty that the whole world marvelled over, because something like what Phil had created was unheard of - a server on such a scale, with such little backlash against the minor god who made it. Phil was laid up for a few days, then was right back up-and-at-'em. Tommy was ten or so, then, Tubbo ten as well and Techno fourteen and Wilbur freshly eighteen, and they were all ready to stretch their legs in a different world than the one Phil had moved them into when they were toddlers, but now, four years and several vaguely memorable conflicts later, Tommy gets why Phil did what he did in SMPEarth. It’s almost the same reason why Dream did what he did to L’Manberg, after all; Tommy has some perspective he didn’t before. 

Phil spreads his wing to gesture at the cozy sitting room enclosing them, lit warmly by the crackling fireplace and bathing all of them in a soft amber. “A place for them to be safe and happy and for them to explore. Of course I get it.”

“SMPEarth,” murmurs George. 

“SMPEarth,” affirms Phil, a brief smile flickering over his face. “But Dream, you’re unique in both your skillset and the extent to which you can use them. Your settling? That’s only you. I’ve never encountered a power like that, ever. The problem is, it hurts you in return. And so do your normal minor god abilities, to an extent.”

Dream cringes. “Phil, it’s not that bad.”

Phil crosses his arms, unimpressed. “No, it really is,” he says emphatically. Pauses, softens, and continues, “It’s not a bad thing. You’re not weak because of it. It’s just a thing. Some minor gods just have a higher tolerance than others, and your settling is unprecedented.”

“I know that,” mumbles Dream, sulkier than Tommy’s ever heard him, sounding not unlike a child getting a scolding. It kind of hits Tommy just then that Dream and Techno are the same age, and to cover for his mildly disturbing epiphany he experimentally adjusts his foot slightly and immediately gets poked, hard, by Wilbur. 

Phil, valiantly ignoring him and Will, says gently, “I know you know. But you should also know that just because you’ve got these powers doesn’t mean you should use them all the time.”

Dream’s eyes snap up, a glint of sharp green under the smooth white mask. Low, deceptively mild, he says, “I know how to use my powers wisely, Phil. I’m not some fresh-spawned god, I’ve been doing this for a while.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Tommy sees Wilbur wince, but Phil says patiently, “And I’ve been at it for longer. Told you to listen to me without interrupting, mate. Part of being a good minor god is being hands-off. I get that you wanna protect your friends, and take their pain away, and all that. I _know.”_ The bucket hat casts a slant of shadow across Phil’s eyes when he bows his head. “I can’t count the number of times a friend or one of my kids has come home hurt, and I wanted to just put a potion effect on ‘em, and fly to whoever or whatever hurt them and hurt ‘em back with everything I had at my fingertips.” He looks back up now, and Tommy’s startled by the intensity of certainty in his grey-blue eyes as he says, “But you gotta learn to do things humanly. Give them a potion. Help them walk home. Ask for help from the people you love; sure, you invited them, but they accepted your invitation, yeah? Love - respect - all that stuff is a two-way street. You can’t do everything by yourself, and you shouldn’t have to, and your powers aren’t a way for you to just negate everything bad that ever happens, ever. We learn from bad things.”

George is outright staring, jaw dropped, looking like he has half a mind to stand up and start applauding Phil. Dream, however, has pulled back slightly, just enough to lean his back into the armchair, fingers twisted together. He starts to turn his foot side to side, gaze intent on his ankle where the sprain is on Tommy’s foot, and Phil reaches out and lays his hand on Dream’s leg, just lightly enough to give him pause and not to forcibly stop him. 

“Dream, you have to let things happen,” Phil says softly.

Dream practically flies into a standing position. Wilbur yelps in surprise, but Dream only has eyes for Tommy; he limps around the coffee table and drops to an awkward crouch before him and asks, quiet, “Are you sure?”, and it takes Tommy longer than it really should for him to process the fact that Dream’s asking if he’s sure he wants the pain of the sprained ankle back. 

He puffs out his chest as best he can whilst seated and declares, “Of course I’m sure! You think a man as big as I am can’t handle thirty seconds of pain? Joke’s on you, I can’t even feel pain!”

Dream’s chuckle sounds forced, but it is still a chuckle, so Tommy takes it with a thrill of triumph, and when Dream offers Tommy his hand with his palm facing up, Tommy drops his own hand into it without hesitation. 

“What?” Tommy demands when Dream stills. “Go on, get it over with.”

“That was quick.”

Tommy rolls his eyes as vigorously as he possibly can and enunciates clearly into Dream’s face, “Pissbaby. It’s fine, I trust you.”

Dream’s fingers twitch. “...Right, then,” he says, with something like dazed awe in his voice. He breathes out slow _relinquish the pain the pain it was nothing big but it was yours yours yours and now it returns is it his is it his_ and ow, son of a _bitch,_ that stings. 

Wilbur pops up next to Dream with an obscenely cheery “Here, drink this, you gremlin,” shoving an uncorked healing potion into his hands. Tommy knows better than to chug it - sprained ankles ain’t shit, half a flask will have him bouncing off the walls in no time - so he throws back what he judges to be the correct amount and grins as he physically feels the ankle right itself. 

“Oh, yeah. Back in business, boys,” he announces, hopping up and leaning all his weight to his right a few times. When there’s no flare of pain, he whoops and pumps his fists in the air amidst Wilbur and Phil’s laughter and George putting his head in his hands. 

Dream sighs quietly, shuffles back so he’s sitting beside his suffering best friend, settles canted to one side to test his foot. 

“See what I mean?” asks Phil, gentle. 

Dream bites his lip, considers. Finally decides on, “I guess.” Shoots a look at Phil that’s warier than warranted and hedges, “I don’t think... I don’t. This isn’t...”

Tommy watches as Phil looks Dream over, opens his mouth to say something with his expression twisted, then changes his mind at the last second. The look on his face melts down warm into a smile and he reaches out to ruffle Dream’s hair (and messes up his braid, which George makes a miffed noise about) and says, “We can work on that.”

Absentmindedly, Tommy kicks at Wilbur’s ankle, just because he can, and as Wilbur shrieks, thinks of an empire built on ice - an empire built on something so glacially cold no one could touch it, but reached out anyway with its frostbite fingers. Thinks of his father, all encroaching frost, the world at his fingertips, choosing humanity, choosing tangible over unattainable. He’s the best god Tommy knows.

He sets his weight more firmly on his newly-healed foot and hopes Dream learns from that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tldr dream gets free and slightly unprofessional but pretty effective therapy from another minor god
> 
> i would go more into depth with this topic, but it’s going to be addressed in the sequel so this is probably as far as it gets to go for atlas until the sequel is done ^^


	4. compass rose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: pre-yht | canon | characters: dream | mild suspense (there's no genre?? it's. like. expositional) | word count: 1.5k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> requested by oohlips123 on ao3! they asked about seeing the scene mentioned in chapter 23 of yht, wherein dream brings up the cardinals and finding the book about them in a stronghold when he was fifteen. this reminded me that i have not, in fact, talked about what cardinals are head in hands they’re kind of important in the lore frick
> 
> “I was rereading YHT the other day and was wondering, if you accept requests, can you write a prompt where a younger Dream finds a book in a stronghold that tells him about the Cardinals? I'm so curious, and I wanna know how close Dream's self-sacrificial, stubborn personality got him to almost breaking one of them. I just thought that'd be interesting to see.”

Dream heaves out a relieved sigh as he slumps onto the stone steps leading into the End Portal, taking a few minutes just to sit there like a shapeless lump and breathe. For all that he’s a minor god and a pretty good fighter he’s just as clueless as the next person when it comes to the End; it’s the first time he’s tried tackling an Ender Dragon, and being unable to die is honestly just a disadvantage in these types of battles. Dream had had to pack twice as many regen pots as the average adventurer and maintaining consciousness through searing pain, while familiar, isn’t exactly fun. 

When Dream finally feels his heart rate settle into some semblance of normalcy, he grins, stretches out his arms and neck, and allows himself a hoarse whoop of victory. It hurts his throat for how much he’d been yelling both profanities and in terror, but it’s triumphant nonetheless - two full weeks of tracking and preparation and he’s done the thing all kids hear about for bedtime stories. The adrenaline hasn’t ebbed yet, so he’s all buzzed even as feels like he could sleep for the next decade, and he honestly feels so weird - in a good way - that he jumps up onto his feet, ignoring how loudly his body protests, and sets off down the corridor outside, intent on ransacking the stronghold. 

It might’ve been beautiful, once. As far as Dream can tell, the stronghold stretches out over six or seven chunks, a winding labyrinth of smooth stone bricks, ivy eating into the walls, a few stray chests filled with worn armor and enchantment books that hum in his hands welcomingly. They’re also completely overrun by hostile mobs, silverfish scuttling over his feet, and Dream swears he can feel muscles that he didn’t know existed yelling at him to stop fucking moving as he ducks and rolls under the arm of a skeleton and decapitates it sloppily. 

His footsteps echo hollowly as he trots around, rearranging his riches in his pack as he goes. Bad and Sam both insisted he take as much of their best gear as he could even though he told them he was probably going to break them (“Better them than you, you muffinhead!”), and a sharp clink underlines his every move. It gets annoying enough after a while - as he thought, both his leggings and chestplate, which were taking the brunt of the abuse from the occasional Enderman and the dragon, broke, so he’s only protected by the boots and helmet - so he ducks into an alcove to remove them and is debating whether or not to toss them when he glances up and freezes. 

“Oh,” he whispers, straightening. “Oh, wow.”

It’s - it’s a library, dust speckling past the torches like snow, that shade of poorly-lit that adds mystique, amber light down cracked leather spines. When he peers in, tucking his boots under his arm, the torchlight slants away, as though disturbed by the new presence after eons of remaining just so.

Dream sidles in, wary of hostile mobs, but no telltale moaning or rattling can be heard, and he relaxes as he runs his fingers over the books. He likes reading, spent many a day sequestering himself in Sam’s tiny study in the corner of the house poring over the medicine books and combat manuals Sam scrawled in, and the library’s fairly overflowing with them, pages upon yellowed pages of red and blue and green.

Dream’s first impulse is, stupidly, to take as many of the books back home with him as he can carry. You can only read Sam’s spindly _nether wart, sugar, water_ and sketched diagram for so long before you get sick of it, no matter how useful the information is, and these books are ancient and untouched; when he swipes a finger over one of the books on a nearby shelf, a chunk of cobweb follows. His common sense roundhouse kicks him in the face about ten minutes into him cramming books into his pack, though, and he decides, like a functional teenager, to curate his experience and pick out what books actually interest him to take back. 

It turns out to be a sound decision, because some of the books are empty save the occasional scribble (“What the fuck,” says Dream blankly to a wild chicken-scratch “THE SQUIDS HATE BUTTER” in one of the journals that aren’t completely blank) and others are so old they literally crumble in his hands. Dream makes it through about half the shelf he’s decided to concentrate on before he actually gets his hands on a book that doesn’t either disintegrate or contain mad rambling. 

It’s neatly printed, a good sign, and the pages weigh heavy in his hands for how thick they are. Dream drops his pack to the side and sinks down into a sitting position, wincing as his legs and his back curse him out for it, spreading the tome out on his lap to leaf through it.

_One knows,_ it tells him, _of the elders. They are ageless (though not timeless) and impervious to wound and illness. Under their tier are the minor gods, those who walk amongst us mortals, offering us their gifts as creators of new worlds, guardians of the human realms._

There’s a thrill down Dream’s spine, a bolt of recognition. He smooths out the illustration on the page describing minor gods intently: gold on cream, a stylized human profile limned in swirls, a hand clasping another. It’s viscerally familiar in a way Dream can’t quite process - he knows the feeling on the page, he knows it from his own opinions and experiences, he just can’t reconcile it with other people. It’s strange, knowing there’s something bigger than what he knows out there; strange, knowing his old god came from a concept he can’t comprehend then vanished into thin air. He thinks about them often, wonders if they’re doing well, wonders at the purpose of the gift they left him with that lets him soothe George’s skinned knees and Ponk’s nicked fingers.

He shakes himself, mutters “Focus,” turns another page. The intricate, boxed-in letters that greet him give him pause.

_The primordials, eldest of the elders, the very essences of space and time, gave the gods their power, their wisdom, their kindness. However, as is the way of life, what is given may also be taken away. To keep their gods true to their calling, the primordials invoked the cardinal laws, the three ways of life that no immortal is permitted ever to break, lest they incur both the wrath of their origins and the direct consequences of their impudence._

Oh.

Wait, oh, fuck, wait, wait.

“Oh, shit,” says Dream out loud, a quiet sort of panic stirring in his gut. “Uh oh.”

He’s never heard of - of “cardinal laws” before. He couldn’t have - born in a hardcore and going almost straightaway into world jumping, between growing up with Sapnap and finding Sam and forming a makeshift family out of himself and seven other bright-eyed, restless kids, he’s never concentrated on his... status too much, especially because this is Bad’s home world and not one he made. The only power in his hands is the gift from the old god, his ability to settle hurts, and - 

What if it’s illegal or something, what his old god did? What if that’s why they never came back? A million worst-case scenarios flash by Dream’s eyes - how the hell is he supposed to swerve the fucking _elders_ \- before he slaps both hands to his face and the sting brings everything back into clarity.

“Don’t be stupid,” he tells himself out loud, stern. “It can’t be _that_ bad.”

He ignores the traitorous little voice in the back of his head that hisses _Yes, it totally could be that bad, you are a literal god, dumbass,_ and runs his thumb over the three inconspicuous lines at the bottom of the page.

_Thou shalt not needlessly harm humans._

That’s... way more ambiguous than Dream expected it to be. What constitutes “necessary” harming? Better just to outright say “Thou shalt not harm humans” - but then, that’d be way too solid and specific for a god to insist on, Dream supposes. The elder-godly MO seems to be “be vague and be terrifying.” At any rate, his heart rate relaxes a little at the words; he likes humans, loves his friends, wouldn’t dream of hurting people. All in all, it seems like a simple rule.

_Thou shalt not disrupt the order of the universe._

What the _fuck_ does that even mean. Dream scowls at the sentence just out of spite; he doesn’t have anywhere near the means to disrupt anything about the universe, so he’s positive he’s fine on that front.

_And thou shalt not forsake thine godhood._

Dream stares blankly at the page for a solid minute before setting the book aside and scrubbing his hands over his face. 

“Useless,” he tells it frankly. “Why are these the rules. Why are they literally the easiest things in the world to follow.”

The pages flutter at him reproachfully.

_(He does skim the rest of the book, because he's not stupid enough to just leave it at that. It’s all myths, tales of the birth of the world as they know it, stories of the old gods as they molded the earth. The first few pages were just a contextualization, groundwork for the reader. Why else put the cardinals there? Why else remind a new god of an oath they were never told?_

_Dream leaves the stronghold with the book placed back into its shelf.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a pretty lowkey, chill chapter all around. just dream doing some lore things
> 
> ALSO MY FINAL EXAMS ARE NEXT WEEK I’M GOING TO BE MIA SORRY ABOUT THAT YOU CAN YELL AT ME ON TWITTER AND TUMBLR @chrysalizzm


	5. "please tell me it's gonna be okay."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: post-yht, pre-sequel | canon | characters: dream, fundy, george, sapnap, bad, ant | angst, hurt/comfort | **blood tw, descriptions of death/mortality tw** | word count: 3.3k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’M ALIVE I MADE IT
> 
> i mashed together requests from my good friend appleflavoredkitkats and commenter Pseudonymous_Elusa ^^ appleflavoredkitkats asked for prompt 63 on a sentence prompt list i reblogged on tumblr with fundy and dream, and Pseudonymous_Elusa asked about how manhunts would work and the dteam’s reactions to it. y’all want some angst?
> 
> 63\. “please tell me it’s gonna be okay.”

Fundy is about two seconds away from having an ugly breakdown, which is - he just - god fucking damn it, he just needs to _focus._

He’s crashing through the woods, graceless, tripping over every root possible, nearly twisting his ankle at one point with the speed of his flight. The fact that it’s the smoke-grey of early dawn outside doesn’t help matters, and only the knowledge that his fiancé is lying in the woods keeps Fundy from running into a tree or stopping to catch his breath. 

Dream’s base is closer, and Fundy’s frantic enough to not notice how brightly lit it is inside; he throws open the door with a resounding crack and takes about three steps in before someone grabs him by the shoulders and shoves him back. If he had enough air to yelp, he would. Instead, he braces his hands on his legs and tries to suck in breaths as deeply as he can as three - no, four sets of boots clomp up to surround him from inside the house. 

“What the - _Fundy?”_

Fundy’s head snaps up.

 _“Ant?”_ he pants back, swiping the sweat away from his eyes to stare at the motley crew scrutinizing him. “Bad, Sapnap, George - what are you doing in Dream’s base?”

The manhunters - because that’s what they are, Fundy can see it now, the four people slated to chase Dream down as the madman hunts down an Ender Dragon - exchange loaded looks that Fundy can’t decipher. That’s five seconds too long for Fundy. If they’re going to stand there staring, that’s fine by him, but he has places he really needs to be. He sweeps past them to rifle through one of the multipurpose chests Dream keeps in the living room, pawing past the fire resistances, dropping the three regens he manages to extricate with trembling hands into his pack, and then a gloved hand is on his.

“Fundy, who are those for?” asks Bad slowly, his tone a side of neutral that’s careful, approachable, that makes Fundy’s heart buckle in his chest. Fundy looks up, and when Bad gets a good look at whatever face Fundy’s making, a quiet, horrified realization dawns on his face.

“We - we have to hurry,” says Fundy, his mouth stumbling over the words, panic making everything roar in his ears, his own voice incomprehensible to himself. “We have to go.”

Bad’s surprisingly strong; he stands Fundy up in one swift move and pulls him gently toward the doorway, a stark contrast to how authoritatively he barks “George, see if you can find Dream’s other potions chest. Sapnap, Ant, you two come with. Where is he?” he says urgently, steadying Fundy when he stumbles over the threshold, the adrenaline going nowhere and making him shaky. “Fundy - ”

Fundy grunts in annoyance, flaps his hands, claps them to his face, and the sting brings his vision back into focus. Summons up the half-broken image of Dream splayed under a canopy of stars and leaves, squints into the thick expanse of oaks, and starts to lead Ant and Sapnap and Bad to where Fundy’d left him, panting, “Not that far.”

“What the fuck _happened?”_ demands Sapnap from somewhere behind him, voice sharper than the edge of an axe. “It’s the middle of the night - morning - and sure, Dream’s sleep schedule is wack, but this...”

“Language,” hisses Bad.

“Not the goddamn _time,_ Bad - ” 

“I just,” says Fundy, hoping the fear suffocating him doesn’t strangle out his voice, “wanted to talk to him. I never got to. This is the first time in weeks.”

Silence descends upon them save the _swish_ of their steps in the grass. 

“Okay,” says Bad, gentle. “Okay.”

Because the festival is two weeks out, now. Dream was finally able to walk around without help a day ago, and helped George and Sam whitelist Phil yesterday, and has been smiling unprompted, and the color and freckles have come back into his face from sitting in the sun, and now - stray arrows, a night too black; Fundy didn’t know that those were the things that could take a convalescing minor god down. He can’t sit beside Dream all pale and brittle and watch their twin rings glint under his tears again - he _can’t._

Fundy’s so caught up in his inner mantra of _I can’t I can’t I can’t_ that he nearly slips in the blood.

“Oh my _god_ \- holy _shit_ , oh my god.”

Even having been there to watch it happen, Fundy still reels backward, squeezing his eyes shut and breathing through his mouth so he doesn’t have to keep inhaling the thick scent of blood. It’s a fucking crime scene, Dream sprawled across the roots of a tall, grasping tree, an arrow in his shoulder and two in his stomach and the one that Fundy gags to see again, traitorously prominent, buried up to the shaft in the right of Dream’s chest. His face is that awful paper white it was when he first woke up. Fundy tries not to think about what it was like then, either.

“Oh, Dream,” breathes Bad, and in a blink he’s crossing over to kneel beside Dream, and Fundy finds himself stumbling after him, handing Bad a regen with numb fingers when the other holds out his hand expectantly, attention fully focused on the minor god bleeding out before him. 

“Fundy, why...?” says Ant, distracted, sinking into a crouch on Dream’s other side, scooting over to let Sapnap monopolize the position of grabbing and clinging to Dream’s slack hand. “It’s... it’s nothing that can’t be fixed up with a regen. Why...?”

Fundy’s hands start shaking again.

“Listen,” he whispers, swallowing hard, pressing his hands to his chest, trying not to hyperventilate. “Ant, Sapnap, Bad, _listen.”_

Bad’s fingers, shiny with blood from the two arrows he’s pulled from Dream’s body, still on the cork of the potion flask. They all audibly hold their breath, and Fundy feels his head sting from the lightheadedness of wrestling with his terror.

A frown flickers across Sapnap’s face. He eases Dream’s hand back to the forest floor and plants his own on either side of Dream’s head, angles his ear close to Dream’s mouth, searching for - blood bubbling in Dream’s chest, or the stutter of his overtaxed heart; something. Anything.

The first weak rays of sun inch over the horizon, peter over the planes of Sapnap’s face the instant he hears what Fundy means.

“Oh my god,” he says.

Fundy feels the tender skin of his knuckles break under his nails. He says, hands bloody, barely a whimper, “Please tell me it’s gonna be okay,” and Bad _flies_ into action.

“Get the other arrows out of him _now,”_ he orders, addressing Sapnap, who’s still in a daze that’s starting to work itself into a distraught one. Smacks Sapnap’s arm when Sapnap doesn’t react the first time, snapping, _“Now,_ Sapnap!” and Sapnap startles out of the glazed eyes into grieving fury, a raging fire of a feeling that sparks over his face. He reaches over to wrench the two remaining arrows from Dream as Bad grabs Ant, whose hands are clamped over his mouth, by the shoulder with a “Take this regen, okay, as soon as Sapnap gets that arrow out give it to Dream, the way I showed you that one time. A bit at a time, or it’ll get in his lungs and won’t do any good, okay?” Ant nods vigorously, white and shaky but resolution on his face. “Okay. Fundy - hey, Fundy?” Bad turns to Fundy now, expression completely open, fear in every crease of it but the line of his mouth steady for all that. 

“Bad,” Fundy says, almost pleading. Bad’s sharp, determined expression softens, then splinters.

“It’s gonna be - it’s gonna be just fine,” he promises, and even though his voice fails him halfway through the sentence Fundy believes him. He laces his ringed finger through Dream’s.

George stumbles across them halfway through Ant’s meticulous ministrations, and Fundy, buzzing from the dregs of the all-encompassing panic of just ten minutes past, watches George’s expression cycle through three variations of horror in high definition. He hands Ant another regen and, after a clink and a curse, a healing pot.

“Healing I or II?” asks Sapnap, voice hoarse but tone keen, his eyes trained unwaveringly on Dream’s face.

“II,” replies George, just as distant. They’re all quiet in earnest now, staring as Ant bites his lip and tips the potion bottle intermittently, as Bad binds the arrow wounds for want of something to do. It’s stupid, how innocuous they seem, tiny tears in Dream’s bright clothes all to show for the garish red arrowheads by Bad’s feet.

Ant gets a third of the way through the healing potion when Dream’s chest rises suddenly, and even in unconsciousness he splutters on it. Ant immediately shoves the flask into George’s hands and tilts Dream’s head in a direction he won’t choke, and Fundy twists his tail in his hands so hard he’s certain he’ll regret it later, but he can’t feel it right now, not through the overwhelming relief stampeding through him, the bone-deep certainty that Dream is alive, and the breath shivering in Dream’s chest is enough to make him dig the heels of his palms into his eyes and whisper, heartfelt, “Oh thank god.”

Ant lays Dream’s head back down and sighs in relief; George and Sapnap both find each others’ hands and hold on so hard Fundy can see their hands go white. Bad pushes his glasses up onto his head and drags his hands over his face, suddenly looking ten years older, eyes dully aglow. 

“...What happened?”

Fundy shrieks in surprise, as does Sapnap. George jumps, almost dropping the healing potion, and swears at Sapnap, gets “Language!”-ed by Bad in return. Ant glares at all of them balefully and turns back to Dream, who’s stirring slightly, his breath still uneven but definitely there. 

“Dream, you’re in the forest with us - Ant, Sapnap, George, Bad, Fundy.” Ant’s eyes flicker up to meet Fundy’s briefly; he adds, “You were walking with Fundy in the morning. Do you remember anything?”

Dream hums in thought, his words softened at the edges by exhaustion. “...Skeletons. Too dark... didn’t see them. Or sense them. ...Was a mistake.”

“You _idiot,”_ begins George, voice swelling in the relative peace of the woods, but one sharp look from Bad and George backs off, albeit scowling. Bad, for his part, says, butter soft, “That’s completely fine, Dream. Do you think you can walk? We should get you back to your house. I don’t want you to - to catch a cold or something.” His voice catches on the word _cold,_ and Fundy remembers the look on Bad’s face when he’d laid his hand on Dream’s cheek to check his temperature in the cot in the White House and had pulled his hand away to show off the ash-grey of a first-degree burn, face stricken. Fundy remembers pressing his face into Niki’s shoulder, remembers someone hissing “That’s a _hundred and twenty degrees,”_ remembers beginning to cry.

Dream makes a cut-off sound of effort, manages to rise onto his elbows, then abruptly sinks back down and admits, laughing quietly and breathlessly, “Sorry... Don’t think so.”

“That’s fine,” says Bad again immediately, reassuring. Plucks at Sapnap’s sleeve and says emphatically, “Sapnap can give you a piggyback ride back, can’t you, Sapnap?”

Sapnap scoffs, but it’s all for show: he’s already reaching over to roll Dream over on his side with an acquiescing “Yeah, sure, but only because Dream gave me so many piggyback rides when we were kids. Tall motherfucker,” he tells Dream as he pulls said tall motherfucker onto his back, with help from Ant and George and a pointed “Language” from Bad. “Not on me if I drop you because your legs are dragging on the ground.”

“...’m fine with that,” mumbles Dream into Sapnap’s hair, manages a chuckle when George swats at his arm in vehement rejection of his words.

Fundy graciously accepts Ant’s hand up because he’s not sure if his legs will support him, leans into them to get the blood flowing, and they all set off for Dream’s base again, though at a significantly more relaxed pace, mostly because they’re all so drained from the frantic pace of the early morning. The sun crawls steadily up over the treeline as they trek in comfortable silence, throwing them all into relief in pale pink, and Fundy’s admiring the light of the sunrise in Dream’s wild, leaf-snarled hair when George suddenly says, “Dream, we wanted to talk to you.”

Something in his tone makes Fundy’s ears flatten, not so much out of nervousness as out of mild apprehension. It’s not meant in animosity, Fundy can tell; none of the people on the server actively seek to hurt one another, especially not anymore, and George rarely tries that with Dream anyway. Still, the looks the hunters throw one another again prompt Fundy into grabbing his tail and wringing it in his hands once more. 

Dream is either too tired to pick up on the odd tone or is purposefully ignoring it. “What about?”

George starts to work his jaw, clearly trying to build up momentum into a proper long ramble, but Ant beats him to it with a sharp, succinct “You weren’t breathing earlier in the forest.”

Dream doesn’t respond. Sapnap stops, and everyone else stops with them.

“...It came up when we were discussing starting up manhunts again,” ventures Bad carefully, his voice deliberately void of accusation or acid. “It hadn’t occurred to us up until then. But we were talking about it, and - Fundy, you know how minor gods can’t die? In the books?”

Fundy, startled at being suddenly inserted into the conversation, nods on impulse. It’s another tidbit of mythology that almost everyone grows up having learned at some point: the system of death and life. Respawn, the gift given to mortals by the elders, for their little people who wanted so desperately to create and explore but were too fragile to withstand those journeys. The gods crafted it. They themselves had no need for it; they’re immortal to time, safe from injury and illness. Or at least the old gods certainly are. Minor gods tend to be a little cagey about their own ties to the respawn cycle, and it’s an open secret that it’s because minor gods can still feel pain, still suffer from sickness, still have to endure recovery from wounds. Fundy’s always thought minor gods kind of got the short end of the stick.

Manhunts. Minor gods. Dream’s lung pierced through by an arrow.

Fundy feels his stomach drop out into the void.

“Dream,” says Sapnap, soft and serious, “how were you doing the manhunts, if you can’t die?”

A long, tense pause. Fundy thinks Dream might’ve passed out but the purse of his fiancé’s lips tells him otherwise. He twists his tail into itself, set on edge by the heaviness of the silence, and from the corner of his eye spots Ant’s tail twitching from side to side, close to the grass. He nearly bursts out laughing in that crucial moment from the sheer hysteria that’s built up from this morning; two of the members of the server whose self-image involves animals showing off the tells of their tails.

Dream says, muffled, “You won’t like the answer.”

Fundy winces. For Dream of all people to admit that whatever it was he was doing to cover for his godliness on manhunts isn’t something his friends are going to want to hear is - it’s progress, certainly, but also particularly telling. Judging by the grimace on Sapnap’s face, the outright devastation on Bad’s, they’ve come to the same conclusion.

“Just tell us,” says George bracingly, squaring his shoulders. “We can take it.”

Dream worries his lip between his teeth for another moment before he finally murmurs, “...I’d... I’d make the manhunt worlds. They’re small... ‘cause we only need one stronghold. I’d take a day to chill from that... and play manhunt straight. If one of you ‘killed’ me...” Dream’s mouth curves in what could be a smile if it weren’t so completely tragic. “...would fake respawn with teleporting. With a healing effect. Stay awake til I was alone, y’know. It... that’s how.”

Ant snatches up his tail, mirroring Fundy; they both press their respective tails to their faces, and Fundy’s pretty sure Ant’s feeling the same chasm of abject horror gape open like a fresh wound in his chest.

“If you weren’t fucking on my back right now,” says Sapnap, voice wobbling treacherously, “I would punch you so goddamn hard. And then I’d hug the shit out of you.”

“What the _fuck,_ Dream,” agrees George, looking sick. “All this time? Is that why - why you don’t like killing people? Because that’s how it is for you?”

There’s a flash of green under the mask that Fundy can make out when Dream’s gaze darts to George; Dream says, low, “I love manhunt. It’s our thing, all of us... ‘s why we do it. I won’t... won’t give that up.”

They stare at one another for another silence, this one far more oppressive in its palpable, unspoken rage. Sapnap looks highly uncomfortable; Bad looks like he’s torn between intervening and reprimanding George and Sapnap for their several past swears. Ant is glancing from George to Dream and back again.

Fundy’s hands are still shaking. It doesn’t stop him from reaching over and burying his hand in Dream’s curls.

“I’m not part of this,” he says, cautious, as Dream freezes. “I’m not part of manhunt, so it’s not up to me to say. But I watch it, for all of you and because it’s amazing, and I think it’s worth everyone listening to each other. Dream wants to keep manhunt - that’s fine, it’s part of him, keep it, but new rules might be in order to newly accommodate, all that.” Fundy unspools some of the worst knots in Dream’s hair. “Honor code? Making Dream quit if there’s really no way out? The audience can think it’s death all they want, can’t they?”

Fundy shuts up once he’s done monologuing, focusing resolutely on Dream’s hair, because he can feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising, indicating they’re all staring at him. Dream is looking at him wonderingly, and Fundy manages to flash him a weak smile.

“Those,” says Bad solemnly, “are very good points, Fundy. Ten out of ten.”

Fundy lets go of the breath he didn’t know he was holding and directs the selfsame shaky smile now to Bad, who mirrors it with a little more confidence. To Dream, Bad says soothingly, “It’s totally okay if you want to keep manhunts. To be honest, I do too. I just think you need to learn your limits, though. Know when to stop.”

“It’s gonna be impossible to teach him those things,” snarks Ant, and dodges with a yelp when Dream kicks at him halfheartedly. Unbidden, Fundy snorts, and then Sapnap smirks, and then they’re all laughing over the stupid joke, probably because after such a hectic morning they desperately need all the lightheartedness they can get.

Later, Fundy will make Dream pinky swear not to do that again. Later, Dream and the hunters will have a blowout fight over the manhunt parameters that forces Fundy to evacuate from the house. Later, Dream will explain, haltingly, the feeling of being suspended between life and death.

For now, Sapnap hikes Dream higher up on his back, and they twine their way through the trees toward Dream’s base, and Fundy rolls his ring on his finger, thinking of freckles under the sun, thinking of the brightness returning to Dream’s laugh, thinking of a future they all get to forge forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thought this would be a Very Good Way to introduce one of the core mechanics of minor gods’ powers - they are functionally immortal, but they are not immune to injury or sickness (as evidenced by dream’s left arm detail in yht, and phil’s got a fair bit of nicks as well). theoretically, this would mean that despite a mortal wound, a minor god would remain somehow alive until healed. 
> 
> also take more casual qpr things unconventional relationships are so pog
> 
> also also sequel under construction pog! skeleton of the plot has finally been finished. interlude is also underway, albeit slowly. if atlas updates are more spaced out in the coming months that’s,,,, probably why,, hoping to get those out to yall soon ^^


	6. chatter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: pre-yht | canon | characters: techno, phil, wilbur (mentioned), tommy (mentioned), tubbo (mentioned) | angst, fluff | word count: 2.6k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay so i did some brainstorming the other day and set several aspects of the young god world in stone so the next few chapters might end up being more expository + i feel like i keep defaulting to angst so i’m trying really hard to lean more into fluff and humor. just not this chapter, because. uh. h. antarctic empire things

The thing with factions servers: power, territory, claims, these arbitrary terms have not-so-arbitrary definitions and implications attached. Factions servers end up fewer and farther in between than games servers - take, for instance, the famous Hypixel, which rakes in hundreds of thousands of visitors daily - because of the attention required to maintain them. Plenty of anarchy servers start life as factions, after all; the intricacies of factions themselves, let alone the semi-worldbending powers each individual player is granted by proxy of being a member or founder of a faction, mean the world creator, owner, and at least a few admins need to be on deck at all times. 

Phil will be the first to admit he wasn’t really thinking about all that when he created SMPEarth. His heart bleeds, sue him - Wilbur was eight when Phil had first found and adopted him, and now, ten years later, Wilbur with his head in Phil’s lap as though he were a kid again, laying out the semantics of a world he’d dreamt up in his head for his friends and family - 

Yeah, you try not to let your heart explode from that one, mate.

So, yes, after brainstorming with his eldest for weeks, Phil raises the curtain on SMPEarth on a brisk November morning. It’s his best work by far - massive landforms and even bigger oceans, sprawling mountain ranges and rolling fields, cuts of desert and spires of ice, pockets of Nether within the Overworld. Wilbur had near passed out when he first saw it, which Phil takes as a success, or as much as he can whilst he’s lying in bed for three days alternating between being vaguely drowsy but somewhat coherent and being out stone cold. 

He conveniently forgets until the whitelisted members start jumping in that factions servers, especially on this scale, require _maintenance._

It’s incredibly last-minute, but he ends up bestowing admin upon Wilbur and Techno at spawn, and grabs Chip before he sets off to do the same for him. The moment he does he feels the pressure ease; even with his massive stores of power, just the fact that he needs to be constantly exerting it in order to keep the factions systems running smoothly makes him apprehensive. Admins, almost always human, at least have the power to whitelist and ban, so Phil can shift some of the weight around as he gets his bearings and figures out how to keep SMPEarth running for as long as he can manage (which, if he has any say in it, is forever, but the pessimist in him laughs him off the stage, so). 

Since Will wanders off on his own in search of territory to claim and Tommy and Tubbo have been expressly barred from joining the server until Phil can guarantee they won’t be jumped at spawn, Techno becomes Phil’s staunch ally in the establishment of the Antarctic Empire. It’s good to see him looking livelier, more like a teenager instead of the grim, deadpan shadow on Phil’s heels he was when he was eight. He’s an excellent fighter and even better strategist and they carve their names into their ever-expanding territory, stamp a legacy into their swathe of sea. Their faction blossoms into an empire. 

And Phil is, more often than not, exhausted. 

He’s young and he’s stubborn so he makes do, but six months later finds him sitting out on the terrace with frost gathering in his hair, a wing in his lap that he thinks he might have been preening, and he has no idea how long he’s been outside.

“Shit,” he says out loud, largely for the sake of hearing himself. His voice doesn’t shake, so he can’t have been out too long, but his fingertips are going blue on the grey of his feathers and his teeth chatter, both bad signs, so he manages to hoist himself up, bundles his wings close to his cloak with a wince, and stumbles in through the dark wooden doors just in time to run straight into a haggard Techno. 

They both nearly go down, Phil with a yelp and Techno with an aborted noise of surprise; ultimately it’s Techno who rights them, plants his hand on the wall and snatches Phil’s fur-trimmed cloak with the other. Phil flaps out his wings once to regain his balance and for a second they stare at each other.

“...You are just the pinnacle of grace, Phil,” Techno finally says drily. 

Phil barks out a laugh and buries his icy fingers in Techno’s hair, skews Techno’s circlet aside with the force of his ruffling, replies fondly, “D-Don’t you know it.”

Techno’s eyes dart up at the light stutter. The beginnings of the smile that was dawning on his face cool into a frown as he scans Phil up and down and asks, “How long were you out there?”

Phil, with the ease of a well-practiced storyteller, says airily, “Oh, about an hour or two,” and muffles a smirk into his alula when Techno swells indignantly without a single change in expression.

“Phil, your wings are gonna _freeze,”_ he says, dropping his gaze pointedly to said wings. “You never put anythin’ over them. Yeah, we’re the Antarctic Empire, but that doesn’t mean you can just casually hang around outside doin’ whatever it is you’re doin’.”

Phil waves him off, though not unkindly; four children adopted by age nineteen meant all four got into the habit of pestering him into taking care of himself, parroting his own words back at him, and he’s gotten used to it over the years. “Yeah, mate, I hear you,” he says, grinning at his unimpressed middle child and the irony of it all. “Won’t stay out for hours at a time, won’t drink and fly, won’t stay up past midnight, got it.” He pauses. Fonder, softer, he adds, “Anything else you wanted to tell me, Techno?”

He doesn’t expect Techno to clamp his mouth shut all of a sudden, for his shoulders to hunch in, and the collapse into himself is so abrupt that Phil reaches out reflexively in alarm, gets his arms around Techno as if to shield him from something, and his legs choose that precise moment to give out on him, so they both sink down to the stone brick. Phil would think he were pathetic if he weren’t so busy pulling back, smoothing his hands over Techno’s stricken face, searching his son’s expression. 

“What’s wrong, mate?” he says breathlessly, worriedly. Techno’s always been the strong, silent type, after all - where Wilbur might slam doors or snap, where Tubbo might seethe and storm, where Tommy might scream his poor throat out, Techno shuts down so completely and utterly that he might as well be a statue. Phil often gets the distinct feeling it’s an internalized issue, but he’s never had the opportunity to bring it up to Techno in those moments of vulnerability, because afterward, he’s right back to his monotone ribbing and casual thrashing of his brothers at spars. Phil always tries to be there - they have to be safe, he’s their father, he has to protect them, _he has to_ \- but he also tries to let his sons come to him first. It’s a matter of trust, always has been; he wants them to know he’s there, but he’s also willing to stay hands-off. It’s how he managed to keep his family unit running relatively smoothly all these years. 

But the crack of fear that glints through Techno’s well-adjusted mask, that flicker of uncertainty that clubs Phil over the head soundly with the knowledge that his boy is still _sixteen_ \- 

“Techno,” he says as gently as he can, even as his ears ring, even as his hands shake with how much power this world and this empire have leached from him, drawing his wings around his child, “Techno, what’s wrong?”

And Techno’s face crumples, and he crunches over til his head rests on Phil’s shoulder, and with a shuddering exhale he admits, hushed, “Been hearin’ things, Phil,” and Phil wraps his wings tighter around him.

“Hearing things,” he repeats, head buzzing both with lightheaded relief and with the speed his thoughts are going. “Hearing what, exactly?”

Techno hesitates, but only for a moment; “Voices,” he admits quietly, and Phil is violently torn for a moment between appreciation that Techno trusts Phil enough to tell him these things so candidly and a wave of alarm.

“...Okay,” he says slowly, reaching up to pass a hand through Techno’s hair. “They say anything to you?”

Techno tenses. Phil lets his hand still.

Take care, always take care. Phil knows better than anyone that Techno’s old life was harder - hardcore-born, anarchy-raised, he has landmines built in that Will, adopted earlier, and Tommy and Tubbo, adopted younger, don’t necessarily have. Phil knows, and Phil tries. 

“You’re my _son,”_ he says to the wall behind Techno, voice fierce in spite of how tremulous it sounds even to him. “No matter what it is - no matter what atrocities you commit, or kids you punt, or whatever - I’m here for all of you, always, forever. If the voices are cussing you out all the time? I’ll give ‘em the boot. They demanding, like, a human sacrifice? I’ll help you work around that.” A thought occurs to him, inspiration landing like a bolt of lightning. “Y’know what? Hey!” He draws away to plant his hands on Techno’s shoulders, shouting into Techno’s bewildered, beleaguered face: “You! Whatever the hell’s back there! Give him a break, yeah? He’s struggling, here, and I’m tryna help him - chill out for ten minutes!”

He and Techno stare into one another’s faces for another brief silence.

It’s Techno, in the end, who bursts out laughing, and Phil smacks his arm with no real heat. 

“I was serious!” he complains as Techno gasps for breath between chuckles. “Are they at least calmer? Was that effective at all?”

Techno pauses, tilts his head, his ears flicking, his laughter dying out in his mouth. He blinks, once, then turns wide eyes onto Phil that shine with something approaching wonder.

“They... you made ‘em quiet down, Phil,” he says, astonished, and Phil, taken aback, says, “Wait, that - how? What?”

“They, uh - it’s - they talk about blood, sometimes,” Techno confesses in a sudden rush, “wantin’ blood, or just pesterin’ me for the heck of it, but they, uh.” A corner of Techno’s lips twitches up as though unbidden. “They stopped when you told them to.”

“Did they?” It’s convenient, then, that Phil and Techno are effectively quarantined together most of the time in a palace of a faction base with no one else for company. Techno can call on Phil any time the voices get out of hand. “Good to know.”

Techno fiddles with his hands for a moment before plowing forward, “They were just whispers, really, at first, but they started to get a lot louder and a lot more insistent in the past few weeks. That’s - they were around for Fit, like three months ago, and I think that’s what made them stronger.”

“The death?”

“I dunno. Just - the blood, or the violence itself, maybe. Haven’t exactly tested it out.” Techno shrugs with one shoulder. Adds as an afterthought: “Started around... what, around December? Probably just before Tubbo’s birthday - whoa, Phil, _whoa_ \- Phil, steady, you good?”

Phil can hear his heartbeat roar in his head, echoing with the force of its _ba-dum, ba-dum._ Almost seven months ago - around the time they established the Antarctic Empire, around the time Phil started getting his energy sapped in earnest, devoting every drop to keeping the server going and keeping the faction strong. Phil has been practically gushing power for months, like some wound that never clots because he keeps picking at it, and being exposed to the brunt force of the energy of a minor god, especially one as powerful as Phil - 

“The voices - they might be my fault,” he says, his own voice nearly failing him.

Techno gives him a startled look. “What?”

“I... I made you and Chip and Will admins, but I never granted owner,” Phil recounts faintly. “So I’ve been keeping SMPEarth alive, keeping the factions framework up, so I’ve been putting out energy constantly, right? I think...”

Phil’s fully prepared for Techno’s eyes to go cold, or for Techno to reel back in shock, or even for a punch to be thrown, and he can feel the feathers on his wings puff up instinctively as he braces himself.

He’s not expecting Techno to slap his hand to his face and groan, _“Phil_ \- you didn’t make an owner? I thought you gave it to Wilbur.”

“...No, I didn’t - he’d gone by then, and since I’m a minor god - ”

Techno looks Phil dead in the eye and says, “Phil, you are just so incredibly dumb.” His expression tightens for a moment before smoothing out; he tacks on a “and the voices agree with me, they’re all sayin’ ‘Wow, kinda weirdchamp’ and ‘idiot, LOL’.”

Phil has to grin at that, if weakly. “Two minutes into telling me and you’re already best friends with them. I don’t know why I expected any different.”

Techno shrugs that one-shouldered shrug again and says matter-of-factly, “Well, yeah, you mighta put voices in my head.” Phil winces. “Can’t be all that bad. Look on the bright side, now I can bully you into giving Will owner and you can talk me outta, like... a bloodthirsty rampage, or somethin’.” At the look Phil gives him, Techno says hurriedly, “It’s just the first thing that popped into my head, don’t take it too seriously.”

Phil sighs, leans back so that he’s sitting properly with his elbows braced on his knees, straightens out his wings as Techno arches an eyebrow at him with far too much self-awareness for a teenager.

Fact of the matter is, Techno’s right, and Phil knows he’s right. Owners are made owners to let world creators ease off on the amount of power exerted into running a world, especially for games servers and the like. It’s more common for minor gods running personal servers as places to come back to to remain both as creators and owners, since such plain worlds require little effort to maintain, nowhere near the nonstop attention demanded by games and factions. Owners have far more abilities accessible to them than admins, can worldbend to some degree regardless of whether they’re human or minor god, have more sway over functions like factions, essentially taking on a chunk of the creator’s burden. If Phil were reasonable, he’d probably have made Wilbur owner from the start, but he didn’t, and here they are, one son with incessant chatter in his head and Phil himself too dazed to function efficiently.

“...Alright, mate, you win this one,” Phil finally acquiesces, shifting his hat to his hand to run the other through his hair, letting his heart melt a bit when Techno lights up before coughing to cover for it. “I’ll call Wilbur this week. Maybe we can get Tommy and Tubbo as well - have dinner, have them stay the night.”

“I’m fine with that,” says Techno, his brusqueness belied by how gingerly he helps Phil to his feet, “as long as you don’t make Tommy bunk with me again.”

“What, you don’t love your youngest brother, Techno?”

“Phil, he _bites.”_

And if the chatter in Techno’s head retreats to the corners to listen to the minor god and his son hold their bright, lighthearted conversation, who’s to tell?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mm. not as satisfied with this one, but there's a ton of lore that's relevant to the story in this chapter, so.
> 
> i’m stating this to convince myself to will it into being: INTERLUDE FIC IS COMING OUT BY END OF JANUARY. i’ve been putting off because it’s so long but i Will Get It To You All. sorry the atlas updates are kinda slowing down!! i’m working on several different things at the moment along with school but i’m Fucking Determined!!!
> 
> also that scene where phil shouts at chat is heavily inspired by a similar scene from Teahound's fic Dual Blades ;; Please Go Read It Right Now i'm emotional just thinking about it


	7. "DUCK!" "WHERE?!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: pre-yht | canon | characters: dream, puffy, niki | fluff, humor | word count: 2.3k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> duckling content for the other starved papa puffy believers out there.. this just in number of parent friends increasing at an alarming rate on young god dream smp

There’s a kid following Puffy through the fair, flitting in and out of her peripheral vision. They’re fairly tall, folded into a bright green hoodie a touch too big, their tawny curls peeking out from behind their hood and the stark white mask with an unsteady smiley face scrawled onto it. The only part of their face Puffy can actually see is their mouth, surrounded by a storm of freckles, and they move easily, very aware of their surroundings and themself. 

“Puffy,” murmurs Niki with perfect calm, never taking her eyes off of the kitschy starglobe she’s turning in her hands, “there’s someone following us.”

Puffy shrugs at that, glancing over the globe. It’s cute - a standard scene of the birth of the world, a stereotypical depiction of the primordials as twin dragons circling the earth, the void swimming with white flakes - but it’s not particularly Niki’s style, and she knows Niki’s examining it from every angle for the sake of having something to do while she keeps an eye on their tail. “Looks like a kid to me. Tall as hell but they’re so awkward about it.”

“They walk like they know how to run,” Niki says mildly. It’s an understatement; when Niki and Puffy move on to a different stand, Puffy looks away for just a moment in order to accept change from the cheery pancake vendor, and when she looks back they’re gone. It takes her and Niki the five minutes needed to finish the pancake to catch sight of them again, leaning against a wall between two vendors with enough casualness to come off as relaxed, as confident, as older and wiser than they actually are.

And Puffy would be wary in any other occasion, given how well the kid blends in with their environment, how smoothly they incorporate themself into the people around them, but as she and Niki round the corner to the next street she manages to catch the shine in their eyes under their mask when their eyes meet and -

“Niki,” she says abruptly, stopping and watching the kid stop dead in their tracks too, neither of them breaking eye contact, “kid looks a little scared of us.”

“As they should,” Niki replies primly, but she stops with Puffy all the same, squinting her eyes at the green figure in the middle of the street. “Why? Do you want to go talk to them? Is this an extrovert thing?”

Puffy snorts. “It’s a fair, the entire purpose is to make friends,” she reminds Niki teasingly, nudging her with her elbow, but she starts off toward the kid all the same, chin tipped high. Most people find Puffy’s exuberance, her confidence, her calm intimidating, and she parts the crowd easily as she makes a beeline for the bright green person frozen a half-chunk from the corner she and Niki were about to turn.

“Hey there,” she says without preamble, offering her hand. “I’m Puffy, and this is Niki. Want to tag along with us, duckling?”

The kid had been hesitantly taking her hand, but they sputter when she says “duckling,” their free hand flying up to tug down their hood farther with a surprised choke of “Duck - ”

Niki covers her mouth with her hand to stifle her snort, then points out lightly, “You were following us around like one. I like that name, Puffy.”

“Duckling,” repeats the kid, like a broken jukebox, the gape of their mouth giving away how dumbstruck they are.

“So it seems,” Puffy replies, amused. “Do we get your real name and your pronouns before we start exploring together?”

Duckling hesitates, then offers timidly, “I use he/him. Um...” His fingers round the edges of his mask as he hedges, and his hood rides further down over his face as his shoulders hitch up, and it’s compassion, as well as common decency, that prods her into saying placatingly, “You don’t have to say your name or anything if you don’t want to, Duckling. We can just call you that, if you like.”

Duckling brightens visibly, nods his head once. “That would be great,” he says, then pauses and flushes and tacks on hurriedly with all the awkwardness of a teenager still growing into his own skin, “Not that, you know, I’d go by that forever, I’m just saying for right now - ” and Puffy feels fondness thread through her chest despite the fact that she makes it a rule of thumb to at the very least suspect people of suspicious activities if they’re over a half block taller than her. Judging by the smirk Niki stifles into her hand, she’s noticed Puffy’s impulse to take anyone so much as a second younger than her under her wing, so Puffy rolls her eyes and kicks halfheartedly at Niki’s ankles and sets off for the next street, tossing over her shoulder, “Let’s go, Duckling - I’ll buy you sweetberry cookies.”

Niki and Puffy hopped onto the world nearly an hour ago, now, but streets upon streets they haven’t traversed yet sprawl out before them anyway, winding their way through the tall, narrow buildings mostly there for the sake of shaping the snakelike fairgrounds. True to her word, Puffy drags Niki and Duckling to a chipper baker with a heart-shaped face for a small pail of sweetberry cookies they pass between one another as they wander. Duckling gets a streak of the jam painted over his mask between his third and fourth biscuit and Niki almost makes herself sick laughing when he daubs it all over the mask to add a blush to the smiley face with only mild chagrin. She and Puffy make him clean it off right away because it’s fucking sticky and he’ll get it everywhere, but all the same, Puffy finds Duckling more endearing the more he thaws out of his quiet, abashed front, with his easygoing nature and thoughtfulness, but she can tell there’s another layer there: he’s clever, his mouth working too fast for his mind, and deliberate in a way that hints at the fact that he’s definitely a capable fighter or traceur, gliding through the crowd with an ease that can’t come just from practice. It’s clear to Puffy, and probably more so to Niki, the hardcore-born between the two friends, that Duckling knows how to survive. 

It’s partly curiosity and it’s partly - well, actually, it’s all curiosity, a hundred percent, so five streets and a paper boat of strips of fried cod later, Puffy asks, “So what brings you here, Duckling? Haven’t seen you around before.”

Duckling shoots her a quicksilver grin, the kind that lights up his face, the kind that tells her he trusts her implicitly, in all lowercase with five-point font. “I haven’t seen you and Niki around either,” he says cheekily, dances nimbly out of range of her teasing swipe. “What can I say? It’s a big thing. A lot of people come. I probably missed you.”

“Fair point,” concedes Puffy, pauses to reach out and dam Niki’s hair from falling into her melon soda. “Still, we’ve been coming for ages - I think I’d notice someone as tall as you, y’know?” Delicately, “And with the mask and all.”

Duckling doesn’t flinch away from the reference to the mask like he did just fifty minutes prior; he laughs, shrugs, thumbs the rim of his mask and tucks a lock of his hair behind his ear. “I wasn’t this tall last year,” he says ruefully. “And there are plenty of people who come by that wear masks. I saw Fruitberries earlier. Illumina, too.”

Niki arches an eyebrow up at him, stirring her soda with her straw. “How do you know those two?” she asks, not unkindly. “Fruit and Illumina are both in traceur and Endchaser circles, and those aren’t as popular as Hypixel groups.” 

Puffy blinks at her childhood friend, not so much out of surprise as out of contemplation. She’s right - Fruitberries and Illumina aren’t in the limelight like the up-and-coming Technoblade or household name Philza, one having climbed the ranks of the Hypixel masses and carved his name into history as one of the best Bedwars players and all-around fighters the world has seen and his father renowned for surviving alone in a hardcore for sixteen years and afterward as a laid-back minor god with an admirable breadth of knowledge at his fingertips. The two that Duckling named are still people only really well-known within select communities - traceurs and Endchasers, like Niki said - and while they’ve begun to work their way into the mainstream public’s eye, traceurs and Endchasers tend to be a more closed-off community than builders, than redstone geniuses, than Hypixel players with a lot of talent to show. The only other people Puffy can think of off the top of her head that are currently rising among the ranks of Enchasers are Pete, or the newcomer Punz, or - 

Puffy’s train of thought screeches to an unpleasant halt, and so does she, dragging her two companions to a stop with her.

“Puffy?” asks Niki after a brief moment, her voice lilting in mild concern, but Puffy only has eyes for the boy beside her in the bright green hoodie and telling white mask complete with its lopsided smiley face.

Barely managing to lower her voice at the last second, Puffy hisses, _“Dream?_ What the fuck are you doing here?”

Puffy didn’t really need confirmation that she was right, but the way Niki sucks in a sharp breath between her teeth in startled recognition and the way Duckling’s shoulders tense up again tells her everything she needs to know. Dream’s another rising star, except where people like Technoblade and Fruitberries and Philza claw themselves out of the woodwork with time and patience and constant attendance, Dream is beginning to see a meteoric rise the likes of which are as of yet unheard of. It’s definitely because of the manhunts - a niche that hadn’t yet been fully tapped into, but one that appeals to audiences regardless of interest because it combines so many different aspects that the average person can appreciate - but he’s now just familiar enough for Puffy to put the face to the name, for her to clap her hand to her face when she realizes how dumb she’s been.

“Just hanging out,” Duckling - Dream - says, sounding not a little miserable. “People don’t really know my features on the fairgrounds. I was gonna bring my family.”

Niki cocks her head. “Fair enough,” she says, then winces and adds, “no pun intended. Why didn’t you tell us your name? We wouldn’t have treated you differently just because you are a popular figure or whatever. Puffy and I don’t care much about that.”

“Speak for yourself,” Puffy says absentmindedly, only half joking. She likes the company of interesting people, of people who are passionate about their areas of study, and a lot of those people happen to be in the public eye. She’s eighteen and can cut a row of falling apples cleanly in half and she's known for it, who’s gonna stop her?

That gets a weak chuckle out of Dream. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Just, like. Self-preservation? Wait, no, that’s - that sounds narcissistic. It just - feels weird to have so much support in so short a time. That just doesn’t happen. And, uh...” What little of Dream’s face Puffy can make out under the mask goes scarlet as he mumbles shyly, “I didn’t mind being called Duckling.”

Puffy feels her heart physically melt. “Aww,” she coos, just to watch Dream pull his hoodie strings so far that none of his face can be seen with a vicious kind of fondness.

“Puffy, please,” he says, muffled. 

“I hope you know she will call you ‘Duckling’ forever, now,” says Niki lightheartedly, swirling the dregs of her melon soda and grinning widely at Dream, who groans and bitches and pretends to drag his feet when Puffy spots another starglobe shop and maneuvers him over as he tries to untie the knot he made of his hoodie ties.

Puffy ended up buying a starglobe for Dream, too, just because. It was similar to the one Niki had been scrutinizing earlier, the birth of the world, the twin dragons, the End, just because Puffy knew what the End meant to the duckling, now. Dream’s entire face had lit up and he’d practically caressed the starglobe close to his chest and promised to cherish it forever far too earnestly, and Puffy and Niki had laughed and pulled him along to the next street as the sun seared orange and the lanterns overhead began to flicker on in green and pink and yellow.

Niki wasn’t wrong, in hindsight. Puffy may very well call Dream by that first, sickly-sweet nickname for the rest of her life. Sue her, it’s cute, she likes the way it sounds, and if it starts with the same letter, it’s damn near close, isn’t it?

Puffy steps through the whitelist portal into Dream’s lovely, lush world with a sigh of contentment, spots the boy she bought sweetberry cookies and a starglobe at a fair four years ago hanging onto a friend for dear life, pale and beaten but his smile no less bright when he spots her back, and Puffy stamps down the impulse to throw herself at him for a hug. Cants her head, smiles at her friend, and the easy breeze combs at the white of her mane as she calls, “Hey there, Duckling. Nice world you got here.”

Dream grins back and says, “Thanks - I made it myself.”

And at least five different people, including a weary, white-blonde version of her childhood friend, will intercept her on her way back to the “Community House” with Dream and his guide, a six-foot-five terror of a man who wears his hair in his eyes and talks like a theater kid, explaining the state of the world and its creator. Puffy’ll reach up on her tiptoes to nudge Dream’s cheek with her hand, feel a soft stir of _staid kind levelheaded well-spoken well-meaning like the figurehead of a ship at sea head tossed back proud and staid and kind_ and tears spring to her eyes. Puffy will know that this is a world that has been rent at the seams.

But it, and its creator, are on the mend, and Puffy has a sword and a crossbow and her teeth - she’ll make it work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you’d like to visualise the fair, imagine a korean street market, complete with the aunties pulling live crabs from tanks, but also with a touristy vibe - so food, souvenirs, some minor attractions
> 
> about the units of measurement: assume one block = a us customary foot. eret uses feet and inches in their chapter, which is pretty customary for people to do in reference to height, but when measuring physical distances people use “blocks”, and rather than miles or meters or km, people will measure longer distances in chunks lol
> 
> also: i stated on my twitter and tumblr but writing may come slower in the next few weeks. came out to my parents, we’re figuring it out. i’m safe and it’s fine, but the mindset isn’t especially conducive to writing right now, so the sequel might be a tiny bit pushed back. thanks for understanding ^^


	8. core and kin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: post-yht, pre-sequel | canon | characters: ranboo, eret, dream, various smp members (mentioned) | mild angst, fluff | word count: 3.1k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i lied, writing and publishing the puffy chap felt great after just not writing for a solid week and a half i’m gonna speedrun the next few chapters
> 
> chapter featuring ranboo’s background, gratuitous lore drops, and a history lesson from eret

Captain Puffy takes one look at Ranboo and announces, “Guys, we have to return this one, they’re too tall,” which is probably the aptest introduction he’s ever gonna get to the Dream SMP. 

Not that he needs one. Ranboo thought he was going to pass away when he’d gotten a completely unexpected invitation from Dream, who’d dipped out of the public eye all of a sudden for nearly a month due to alleged health issues, to join his server. It’s common knowledge that Dream’s server is under lock and key, meticulously maintained by said owner and flock of admins, and the vast majority of Dream’s time is spent in that world; speculation has been thrown around about the place being his home world, but Ranboo himself would put money on Dream being hardcore-born - he just gives off that vibe - and at any rate, it’s nobody’s business but Dream’s and the other people who live there. 

Still, it’s a huge honor, and Ranboo recognizes that, realizes at some level that he may be on thin ice, so at Captain Puffy’s lighthearted needling, he hikes up his shoulders and hunts in vain for some kind of witty comeback that also establishes respect for Puffy, but his mind draws an immediate blank, and he ends up just not saying anything at all. It really doesn’t help that he’s currently surrounded by another half-dozen SMP members that are scrutinizing him intensely, and being the tallest and strangest-looking in a crowd of people both older and more experienced than him isn’t exactly pleasant. 

Finally, a boy with a golden mop of hair and a loud, plum-colored hoodie - Purpled - plants his hand on his hip and says apologetically, “Sorry Dream’s not here - he had a bad turn last night so Alyssa and Callahan are pretty much holding him at gunpoint right now so that he doesn’t do something stupid,” and wow, if Dream’s been laid up this whole time, it must really be pretty bad, but before Ranboo can wrack his brains for some suitable expression of condolences or well-wishes or something, there’s a delighted call of “Ranboo!” from further off by the crumbled walls hemming the world spawn, and Purpled shuffles out of the way to turn and look over at one of the blown-out holes. 

Ranboo feels a smile creep across his face when he sees who it is - Eret, swaying like a willow in the cutting November wind, one hand to the ridiculous yet somehow fitting wide-brim sunhat on their head and the other waving at him. Ranboo and Eret go back a fair bit - Eret and Niki were the ones to get Ranboo more comfortable in English, after all, following a childhood of Ender - and it’s good to see them again, brighter-eyed than usual, as they jog across the grassy clearing to the cluster of people. 

“Good morning, Puffy,” they say pleasantly, tipping the sunhat for show and eliciting laughs from everyone. “Purpled, Schlatt, Ponk. Sam. Fundy, Skeppy.” They click their tongue as they look Ranboo over, their eyebrows lifting. “Are none of his vouchers here? Was that my job? Sorry I’m late, I got caught up with making beacons.” 

“You’re fine, dude, he just got here,” says Schlatt dismissively, waving Eret off, though not unkindly. 

“My vouchers?” blurts Ranboo before he can help himself. He feels his ears wilt back when the others look over at his words, but Eret smiles, adjusts their hat and sunglasses, and gestures for Ranboo to follow them, so follow them he does, a little confused, a little lost. Ponk gives him a commiserating pat on the shoulder and a “Welcome to hell,” which Purpled socks him in the arm for, but as they disperse, Ranboo feels the stir of anxiety he’d felt settle - the other server members, scattering in various directions are all smiling kindly as they watch him go, and when he catches Ranboo glancing back, Skeppy grins and waves, and Ranboo manages the brainpower to wave back weakly, taken aback somewhat by the friendliness, the openness, the familiarity that permeates this server.

“So, vouchers,” says Eret, jerking Ranboo’s attention back to his tour guide. “Dream makes it a rule of thumb to only let people join if people already on the world vouch for them. It’s not that he doesn’t trust us,” they add hurriedly, “it’s a matter of safety. Dream’s very proud of this world - it’s like a safe haven.” Lower, soft, “He made it for us. He respects us and he loves us, and we do too in turn, so - vouching. Easy way for all of us to vet incoming members.” 

“Oh,” says Ranboo, almost wonderingly, at the idea that people asked for him to be here. Him, painfully awkward and still unsure of who he is. Eret must read it on his face, because they smile warmly and reach out to squeeze Ranboo’s arm and say, “You’ll fit right in, Ranboo, don’t worry. Dream doesn’t invite people we don’t like.”

It’s not exactly the vote of shining confidence Ranboo had been half-looking for, but it’s better than what he expected, and Ranboo feels himself straightening up further and further out of his self-conscious slouch as Eret leads him down what they call the “Prime Path,” past various sprawling houses in various styles (they pass a towering, extravagant palace that Eret introduces proudly as their own abode, while several chunks down there’s a scattered collection of suspended blocks that looks like the burnt-down skeleton of what once might have been a neat, if conventional, house). Ranboo didn’t exactly have a traditional upbringing in his home world - though it’s difficult to label any childhood as “traditional,” given everyone has different experiences in their home worlds, and Ranboo’s definitely not the first to have been raised by other mobs - seeing as he spent a fair portion of his formative years surrounded by Endermen culture. It’s a mystery why the Endermen chose to rear him instead of, you know, killing him, curious wandering child that he was, but Ranboo knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. He likes that part of himself, anyway - in spite of the strange half-and-half mottle of his skin, his left side distinctly human in its fair complexion and chestnut hair and the right distinctly Enderman in its black scales and bright green eye and whip-thin, tufted tail, he likes being able to nod and wave when he passes an Enderman in a server, or ask for a block to hold from an adult, or ask questions in Ender that are answered in kind. 

He still has to be a functional member of society, though, especially given he’s some kind of minor public figure now. Ranboo has Eret and Niki to thank for his fluency in human tongues and human culture, them having stumbled across him in his home world while they were worldhopping. They were all young, but they all tried their best (though quirks of speech from his first language carried over - Ranboo still can’t pronounce his vowels tall like Eret and Niki do), and Ranboo knows how effective they were, considering how conventionally human he looks now; he looked nearly like a full Enderman as a kid.

“I should probably explain how the hierarchy works here,” says Eret suddenly, pulling Ranboo from thoughts of childhood and grasping hands that patted him on the head and handed him ender pearls still cool to the touch. Catching Ranboo’s apprehensive look, they laugh and push their sunhat further back from their face. “Don’t worry, it’s not anything terrible! It’s just, ah... some discretion is in order.” 

“Okay,” says Ranboo, slowly and still a little warily.

Eret turns away slightly, facing toward the end of the prime path, which juts off to the right abruptly and winds down into a flight of stairs that Ranboo can’t see the end of. “Dream,” they say emphatically, “isn’t just the world owner. He’s also the world creator.”

Ranboo blinks at Eret once. Twice. 

“...The creator?”

“Yeah...”

“As in. You mean as in a minor god?” Ranboo feels his brain boot back online, and then start to make him jittery. “Oh my god. Dream is a _minor god?”_

“You’re taking this a lot better than I thought you would,” observes Eret, mild as milk. Ranboo makes a strangled noise.

“There aren’t even any _rumors,”_ he whispers, “about Dream being a minor god. How quickly does he shut those down? Even _I_ get questions if I’m a minor god and I’m nowhere near as popular as he is. I mean, they’re not serious or anything, of course, but - _Dream?_ People don’t wonder if he’s a minor god, with how good he is?”

“Dream’s skill comes innately, not from his godhood,” Eret says, not sharply, but the defensiveness is there, and Ranboo bows his head, chastened. Eret pats his arm and adds, “And at any rate, his being a minor god is actually supplemented by a considerably more surprising fact.”

“Next thing I know you’ll tell me he’s an elder,” Ranboo grumbles at his friend with no real heat, letting himself get tugged along down the oak planks toward the runoff toward the - 

Ranboo stops dead in his tracks for the second time that day with an awed, hushed _“Wow,”_ falling involuntarily from his mouth as he takes in the land below.

“This is Man - this is L’Manberg,” says Eret, smoothly passing over their stutter, gesturing with a flourish toward the sweep of gently sloping hills, thick clusters of trees gathered round cheery wood rooftops like flowerbeds in village gardens (and it’s always a good sign when server occupants build their houses with flammable materials, one of the biggest signs of unvoiced trust you can get), the occasional rise of larger communal buildings like the somehow cute glass dome housing what Ranboo can vaguely make out as beehives and an eye-catching quartz mansion sitting on the peak of a taller hill. Afternoon spills golden over L’Manberg nestled cozily into the forests, and Ranboo can’t help how his mouth drops open at the ethereal sight of it.

Eret sighs. “You never get a view quite like this of the Badlands or the Greater SMP,” they complain jokingly.

“No kidding - Eret, this place is - it’s beautiful,” Ranboo manages helplessly. Unbidden, the thought rises to the back of his mind: _Dream made this place for them - does that count me too, now?_

The corners of Eret’s mouth quirk up, and their gaze is butter soft as they scan the country before them. “L’Manberg,” they say quietly, “was founded practically as a joke. The fighting that came afterward, too, was almost a joke. It was Dream and Punz and George and Sapnap against Wilbur and Tommy and Tubbo, me and Fundy, Jack and Niki. We couldn’t have won even if we’d had the best gear this world could offer.” Eret chuckles, but some part of it rings hollow, and Ranboo feels his breath catch and stop in his chest as Eret continues. “I betrayed my - my country, in the end. Dream offered me kingship of the Greater SMP if I sold them out, so I did, because I thought I could - I could fix it, or something. It was still a game, then, Ranboo. Tommy offered his life for his country, and he and Dream had a duel - Dream shot him in the heart, an instant kill, but Tommy gave up his discs, his most prized possessions, for L’Manberg, and that was that.” Eret shrugs, wraps their arms tighter around themself. “Even though we all came out of it a little shaken, it still felt lighthearted. War games. It’s always like that, isn’t it? Us with our infinite lives?”

Ranboo can’t interject. He’s mesmerized by Eret’s quiet, familiar cadence, the finality with which they describe the abridged history of this server. In the fading afternoon sun they look evanescent even as their voice remains admirably steady, and Ranboo can’t bring himself to break their groove. 

Eret’s voice breaks off hollow. “Schlatt joined, and something went wrong.” They tug at the brim of their sunhat absentmindedly. “It’s not his fault. It’s not Wilbur’s, either. Wilbur wanted to hold an election - for the bit, you know - and Schlatt joined mostly as a joke. Dream brought him back, after his... his prank, back during the summer. Everything seemed fine, at first, Wilbur leading the pack and everyone else trailing behind, the debates and the banter. All in good fun. And then - and then on election night, Schlatt told us he’d pooled his votes with Quackity. That he’d absorbed Quackity’s party and his votes, and he’d won. He exiled Wilbur and Tommy.”

Eret’s eyes drift far away, for a moment. “...Dream said that night he’d try to do everything he could. Idiot,” they tack on, half-fond and half-pained. Ranboo sucks in a sharp breath at the indescribable, visceral expression on their face.

They snap out of it in their next blink, clear their throat, and continue brusquely. “Wilbur and Tommy formed a commune, of sorts - a rebellion? An opposition against Schlatt and his Manberg - that’s what he renamed the country to.”

“Pretty bad name,” Ranboo offers lamely, in an effort to lighten the mood. It works a bit - Eret snorts - but then they dive right back into the history lesson, and really, the more Ranboo hears the more concerned he becomes for the mental state of the people who lived through it.

“We all... the people of Manberg, especially, suffered. Schlatt - well - it wasn’t him, not really. Schlatt and Wilbur both - we’re still not entirely sure who or what it was that did it, we’ve been calling it ‘the madness,’ but both of them sort of... lost sight of themselves. They were - they were possessed, really, and they said and did horrible things, but - but it wasn’t _them.”_

 _“Possessed?”_ repeats Ranboo, horrified. “Eret - ”

“This place isn’t dangerous,” Eret amends hurriedly, head whipping around to focus on him again. “This leads into my point, actually - Dream has this... _thing._ A gift, from an old god. He calls it settling.” They sigh. “It would be easier to explain if he were here and he could show you... but he can sort of - sponge up hurts? Pain?” They trail off, gnaw on their lip, then say quietly, “He can take hurting from people for himself.”

“Oh no,” says Ranboo, his hand covering his mouth; he doesn’t remember doing it. There’s dread in his gut, even though this has already all passed, even though everyone has clearly lived past this. Dream dipping out of the public eye for a month, whispers of grave wounds and severe illness and the occasional baseless rumor that he’d died - Ranboo swallows hard and says, “He did that for Schlatt and Wilbur. Am I right?”

Eret’s smile is mirthless. “And the people of Manberg, as well. It’s - he said he’s passed out for weeks before just making this world.” They lift their hands to indicate the quiet, charming Eden around them, and Ranboo feels a sudden prick of - of something. Guilty gratitude? How is he supposed to feel knowing the ground he stands on might have been born of blood? “He spent a week in a complete coma with a fever so high it would’ve killed a normal person - ”

“Good thing I’m not a normal person, then,” rasps an amused voice behind them, and Ranboo gets whiplash from how fast he jerks around.

Dream is standing there - or, well, leaning against the cliff face that arcs up beside the Prime Path, smirking lightly. Ranboo’s almost impressed with how put-together he looks given what Eret told him; his hair’s a fair bit longer than it was before, though still pulled back into his signature half-up half-down, and despite being much paler than he used to be his freckles still stand out stark on his face and bare arms. He’s not in his usual hoodie and cargos, swamped instead in sweats and a t-shirt in spectacularly clashing shades of lime green and orange, but none of it takes from the fact that Ranboo is currently staring down one of the biggest public figures and the person who invited him here and a _minor god_ right now.

“Hi, Ranboo,” Dream offers gently, and Ranboo jolts out of his staring.

“Um, hi - I’m Ranboo, which - which you probably know, since you invited me here and all - oh, my god,” Ranboo mumbles, burying his face in his hands. _Strong start, voidwarper._

There’s a snort from Eret, and then a shuffle of cloth and Eret saying, sharp, “Dream.” Ranboo looks up from trying to smother himself in embarrassment to see that Dream’s strolled over to stand in front of him, looking up into his face carefully, something deliberate in his expression. He holds out his hand, palm facing up, and Ranboo, without thinking, drops his hand into Dream’s

_gentle gentle smooth the waves down at sea hills more than crags curious warmhearted there is no cliffside here_

“Oh,” says Ranboo again, surfacing out of the settling - because that’s what it was, he gets it now, what Eret was trying to put into words - and draws his hand away to clasp it to his chest because some kind of - of huge, heartfelt feeling is welling up under his ribs and he thinks inexplicably that he might cry.

“Dream - you settled him?” demands Eret, and the flicker of disapproval in their voice anchors Ranboo back down; he blinks up to see them striding over, taking Dream’s hands in theirs with incredible care, scrutinizes him. “No - okay, wait, sit down for a bit. Do Alyssa and Callahan know you’re here?”

“I didn’t settle him,” says Dream, faking hurt, shooting Eret some of the most effective puppy eyes Ranboo’s seen in his life (and he’s seen Tubbo beg his way into two extra slices of pumpkin pie at a fair before). “I only reached out. There’s a difference and you know it.” He does sit down, though, and pretends not to sigh a little in relief when he does. Ignoring Eret’s smug look, he adds, “And Alyssa and Callahan know that I’m gone.”

“Do they know where you _are,”_ says Eret exasperatedly.

“Don’t you start parenting me, too, we’re the same age,” says Dream, expertly dodging the question. Their light banter startles a laugh out of Ranboo, and Eret and Dream both shoot glances up at him when he does; he flushes and almost apologizes before Dream’s expression softens. He tips his head up to look at the sky simmering orange and says, kindly, “Welcome to our home, Ranboo. It’s nice to meet you.”

Ranboo tries not to choke up too badly as he says, “Thank you for having me - it’s nice to meet you too.”

Judging by the fond looks Dream and Eret exchange and the handkerchief he gets handed, he doesn’t do a great job at it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the people who vouched for ranboo were niki, fundy, eret, and tubbo :,)
> 
> “voidwarper” is a funny little enderman name that’s basically the ender equivalent of the english term “idiot” akjsdhfsadfj;; it’s a reference to endermen who accidentally teleport into the void, which edges their home territory of the end. ranboo himself, of course, can’t teleport (since he’s a human), but it’s a common ender term.
> 
> and here comes a fundamental part of yg world mechanics: minecraft skins. there are no such things as hybrids or sentient mobs or the like; all people are just. human (including minor gods, biologically speaking, although their appearances can shift the same as humans). the way that one looks at the base level (so, their biological forms, not their clothes or accessories) is influenced by their self-concept. based on how they truly see themself, deep down, be it consciously or subconsciously, that is how they will look to the world. in other words, they don’t actually have any control over how they look - if their self-image changes, the way they look changes along with it. people with unrealistic or wacky appearances are therefore very common in the yg world.


	9. sly as a fox

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [setting: pre-yht | canon | characters: fundy, wilbur, phil, tommy, tubbo, techno (mentioned) | mild angst, fluff, humor | word count: 2k]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hm. i debated on it for a while, but because young god is set in the smp world as opposed to the real world and thereby is not an accurate reflection of the content creators themselves - yes, in young god, fundy is trans. i left it very open-ended in yht, but just the fact that wilbur wrote it into canon, that fundy agreed to do it, was really big for me, and it brought comfort to a lot of trans people - yknow, knowing that the dream smp is safe for trans and gnc people to consume. i probably won’t be making it a Big Thing in young god that much, but like the qprs i’ve gently put in the tags, it’s a fact in young god canon.
> 
> anyway have some wilbur watched phil frantically adopt four children in the span of one year and learned from the best except the kid he finds is only three years younger than him

Wilbur takes one look at the shivering, skinny kid on his doorstep and says, “I’m adopting you.”

The kid’s eyes flicker up to Wilbur, startled. “What?” they say slowly. 

“Sorry, that’s awkward - here, c’mon in, let me just - ” Wilbur plucks at the threads that hold the world together that he can just barely make out thanks to his new ownership (and that’s a whole different can of worms - Wilbur hadn’t yelled at Phil before in his life, not like that, but it ended up working out well enough), rearranges the faction power of Newfoundland to cloak the younger stranger. The kid blinks, holds out their hand toward the doorframe, isn’t shocked away like they were just moments previously when the territory refused them entry.

“There we go,” says Wilbur proudly, grabs the kid by the rain-soaked cloak and ushers them inside with a harried “You’re gonna catch a cold, come in, and I’ll call my dad. Can I get your name? And your pronouns? I’m Wilbur, he/him.”

“Fundy.” Fundy sloughs off the cloak, about as useful as a water bucket in the Nether at this point, twists it in his hands anxiously. “...He/him.”

Wilbur nods at him, takes the cloak and wrings it out right onto the wood floor, because there’s mold anyway, what’s a little more. “Alright. Wait one moment, let me get my communicator...” He lays the damp wool over his crackling furnace to dry and pats himself down, completely blanking on where he put it for a second. Fundy - who’s got sharp features, hair that might be bright orange if it weren’t for the weak torchlight and storm-black sky dullling it, and black-tipped, triangular ears struggling to lift themselves off of his head - surveys the cramped sitting room. 

Wilbur’ll be the first to admit it’s not pretty (“You live in a state of constant entropy, Wilbur,” Techno had said, deadpan, the first time he’d set foot in the scruffy Newfoundland cabin decked out head-to-toe in enchanted diamond) but Niki, upon visiting, told him that the disaster added personality (it might just have been his best friend being overly nice, as she’s want to do, but Wilbur will take what he can get). To Niki’s credit, every inch of the clutter screams _Wilbur_ ; it’s a five-by-five of furnaces piled high with jumpers and empty guitar cases sagging over their edges, two stands filled to bursting with meticulously-packaged discs and their accompanying two jukeboxes, a uke and two guitars draped over his faintly ratty sofa, a box rolling around somewhere hopefully containing his backup capo and extra strings. A crafting bench can barely be seen under the five ceramic pots of miscellaneous plants that both Eret and Phil are trying to convince him to grow, but the orchid, daisies, and tomatoes are all dead or dying, and Wilbur doesn’t really have high hopes for the bluebells and tulip, either.

Wilbur finally digs out his communicator from his pants pocket with a triumphant shout and rings Phil on autopilot with one hand whilst pawing through a pile for some sort of towel with the other. He passes the first one he finds, bright green and patterned with sunflowers, to a bewildered Fundy right as someone picks up.

“Phil, I’ve found meself a son,” he announces. Fundy freezes and turns to stare at Wilbur in the middle of drying out his hair, every inch of him perfectly still.

 _“What the fuck,”_ replies the other end, in a very familiar voice that is absolutely not his father’s. Wilbur blinks, then winces and jerks the communicator away from his ear just in time for his youngest brother to screech away from the call, _“Dad, Wil’s drugged up or some shit, he’s talkin’ nonsense!”_ Closer to the communicator, Tommy adds, with that special brand of condescension that can only be mustered up by eleven-year-old children, _“You high on life, big man? How much have you taken?”_

Wilbur pinches the bridge of his nose. Fundy keeps staring. 

_“Oh - Tommy, go find Tubbo, alright? Tell him Techno’s bringing back bear for dinner.”_ Rustling as the communicator changes hands, then, _“Wilbur? You good, mate?”_

“Found a kid in the rain,” Wilbur tells his father patiently, as Fundy, albeit slowly, resumes ruffling his hair. Now that he’s turned away, Wilbur can see a bushy tail, as well, sopping wet but sweeping back and forth tentatively. It's very endearing. “I think I’ll adopt him.”

 _“Wil,”_ sighs Phil exasperatedly, and Wilbur can hear the telltale _shuf_ of Phil adjusting the sheaves of his feathers absentmindedly. _“Details? How old is he? Do I need to go over there? Should I send Techno?”_

“Isn’t Techno busy hunting bears or whatever it is you’ve got him running around for?”

_“He’s just wandering ‘round the citadel. I’ll call and ask later. And don’t you try to swerve the question.”_

A smirk creeps into Wilbur’s voice. “I mean, as long as you’re willing to babysit, I won’t make you suffer. All you have to do is send perfunctory holiday cards.”

 _“Wil...”_ says Phil warningly.

Wilbur snorts, then softens; lowers his voice against the lash of rain against the windows and says, more seriously, “Yeah, his name’s Fundy. Knocked on my door just now. He’s soaked, but I’ve given him a towel and I’ve cranked up the furnaces.” Lower, “I don’t think he’s got a place to go, Phil.”

 _“Well, hardly any of us do, now, don’t we?”_ says Phil, but the matter-of-factness of his statement is heavily outweighed by the salient sympathy that seeps through the call. He sighs again, tinny, then asks, _“Is he in danger or anything? Did it seem like he was running?”_

Wilbur cups a hand against the communicator mic and asks Fundy bluntly, “Are you in danger?” Faintly, he can hear what sounds like a hand impacting against a face on the other end of the call.

Fundy startles; his eyes dart up from where he was patting down his tail. He’s not exactly dry, but nowhere near the drowned, scrawny thing he was just minutes prior; his ears swivel back, flicker, and he blinks at Wilbur warily.

Good grace prompts Wilbur to add hastily, “Not that - SMPEarth - that’s the world you’re in, I came up with the concept and my dad made it, it’s a long story - but SMPEarth is a safe place, and especially with me. I can promise no harm’ll come to you. Just - y’know - ” Wilbur gestures helplessly, “ - are you safe? Are you okay, Fundy?”

Fundy’s ears honest-to-god wilt against his head, and Wilbur’s only seen that happen with small animals when they’re backing away from him, and this five-foot-something teenager’s expression falling like that in combination with what Wilbur knows about mammalian body language all just serves to maim Wilbur deeply. He hangs up on Phil without a second thought (which he’ll probably get shit for later, but that sounds like future Wil’s problem) and crosses the room in two strides to crouch before Fundy, peering up into his stony face.

Being the first of Phil’s adopted children is his saving grace right now - he still remembers, if with a little difficulty, how Phil approached all four of his very different sons. Wilbur knows he’d been a slightly distant, wary kid with a crippling weakness for music and books; Tommy was a goddamn _biter_ , and to this day is one of the main reasons why Wilbur hates toddlers; Tubbo had been a wily little gremlin that charmed people by acting all cute and innocent and then proceeded to do a complete one-eighty. The brother that Fundy reminds Wilbur of, though, is Techno: quiet, politely standoffish, and with certain lines drawn that Wilbur always found difficult to navigate. It’s only recently that Techno’s begun to look more and more human, after all, where when Phil first found him in the Nether he was nearly fully piglin in appearance. Only after Wilbur was older did he consider the fact that physical appearance reflects self-image, that piglins are known for their insatiable greed and individualistic, eat-or-be-eaten culture, and confront the fact that Techno had been eight when they’d found him like that. 

Foxes, culturally regarded as tricksters, as beings of cunning, and occasionally as heralds of famine or drought amongst villagers when they’re spotted toting wheat or animal hides. 

“How’d you come to be in SMPEarth, Fundy?” Wilbur asks gently, maneuvering them both over to the sofa. He sits Fundy down, pushes his guitars firmly off to the side to make room for himself, all whilst maintaining eye contact.

Fundy opens his mouth, then purses his lips as he apparently rethinks what he was about to say. Wilbur can see the awkward ridge to the line of his mouth where there must be the molars of an actual fox, which, okay, Wilbur might have to rethink the snacks he’d been about to offer.

“I,” Fundy finally ventures, careful, deliberate, “was worldhopping. I came here by accident. I would have left as soon as I came, but - ” Fundy’s tail wags once in his grasp, “ - it’s, ah. It’s - this world is amazing, and I was exploring. I... got caught in the storm by accident.” There’s not a single waver to his words. If he’s lying, Wilbur’s incredibly impressed. At any rate, if his gut’s anything to go by, Wilbur thinks Fundy’s telling the truth (tails don’t lie, as Wilbur’s seen from Techno before the tail disappeared, and Phil before the tail feathers were shed), if omitting things, which is his prerogative. 

“Okay,” he tells the kid chipperly, ignoring the fact that his sofa might be further molded by the rainwater off of Fundy with practiced ease. “Well, alright then. I mean, thank you for liking the world. I’m glad! It sure is something, innit?”

Fundy looks caught-off-guard by how casually Wilbur accepts his explanation. “Uh, yeah,” he says awkwardly, but Wilbur doesn’t miss the way his shoulders relax from where they’d been pulled taut against any potential backlash, and he has to preen internally at the fact that the boy doesn’t even flinch at the harsh peal of an incoming voice call. 

“Hello - ”

 _“Phil had to leave to help Techno haul in the bear,”_ reports the imperious voice of TommyInnit, most obnoxious prat to ever prat in existence, “but he told me to tell you that you’re a wanker, Wilbur Soot.”

Wilbur allows himself to shoot a wry, commiserating look at Fundy, who, surprisingly, shoots it back with a halfhearted shrug. Judging by the way the corners of his lips are tugging up, he’s finding Wilbur’s suffering a tad too amusing for comfort. “He did not. Give the comm back to him, you child.”

 _“I am_ not _a child,”_ Tommy hollers back immediately, predictable as always. _“I’m the biggest man in this entire fucking Empire!”_

 _“Techno’s taller than you by two inches,”_ comes Tubbo’s voice, mild, from further away. Wilbur cringes at the sound of the communicator being tossed aside and smothers the unbearable screeching with his shirt sleeve as he says with near-manic cheer, “Siblings, am I right?” He tips the communicator to check whether the two youngest have killed one another yet, and when he glances up his breath catches in his chest as he gets a good look at the expression on Fundy’s face.

It’s nothing so one-dimensional as longing, though a skim could probably fool someone. There’s wonder there in the tip of Fundy’s chin, the roundness of his eyes, and interest and curiosity and a faint pang of envy that Wilbur can hardly fault him for; not to toot his own horn, but the dynamic of his family is truly impeccable.

“Are they your...?” Fundy asks tentatively, and Wilbur physically feels his entire body warm at the prospect of introducing his brothers to someone, even if they’re practically a stranger that Wilbur has efficiently psychoanalyzed and has now decided upon officially adopting, although for legal reasons and Phil’s mental health, that’s a joke.

“Welcome to the family,” Wilbur says, only half-wisecracking, and doesn’t miss the grin that snakes across Fundy’s face before he ducks his head to hide it. “Yeah, the irritating child was Tommy, the littlest. I can’t guarantee you won’t hate him on first sight, but if you give it time...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I UNDERESTIMATED HOW BUSY I AM GOING TO BE BUT I'M POGGING THROUGH IT NONE OF YOU ARE READY FOR ALL THE CONTENT I’M COOKING UP


End file.
